The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

↩

The punishment of the sin of Lust. ↩

It is near sunset, and the western sky is white, as the sky always is in the neighborhood of the sun. ↩

A ghostly or spiritual body. ↩

Pasiphae, wife of Minos, king of Crete, and mother of the Minotaur. Virgil, Eclogue VI 45, Davidson’s Tr.:⁠—

“And he soothes Pasiphae in her passion for the snow-white bull: happy woman if herds had never been! Ah, ill-fated maid, what madness seized thee? The daughters of Proetus with imaginary lowings filled the fields; yet none of them pursued such vile embraces of a beast, however they might dread the plough about their necks, and often feel for horns on their smooth foreheads. Ah, ill-fated maid, thou now art roaming on the mountains! He, resting his snowy side on the soft hyacinth, ruminates the blenched herbs under some gloomy oak, or courts some female in the numerous herd.”

↩

The Riphaean mountains are in the north of Russia. The sands are the sands of the deserts. ↩

Beatrice. ↩

The highest heaven. Paradiso XXVII. ↩

In one of Ceesar’s triumphs the Roman soldiery around his chariot called him “Queen”; thus reviling him for his youthful debaucheries with Nicomedes, king of Bithynia. ↩

The cow made by Daedalus. ↩

Guido Guinicelli, the best of the Italian poets before Dante, flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century. He was a native of Bologna, but of his life nothing is known. His most celebrated poem is a Canzone on the Nature of Love, which goes far to justify the warmth and tenderness of Dante’s praise. Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, p. 24, gives the following version of it, under the title of “The Gentle Heart”:⁠—

“Within the gentle heart Love shelters him,
As birds within the green shade of the grove.
Before the gentle heart, in Nature’s scheme,
Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love.
For with the sun, at once,
So sprang the light immediately; nor was
Its birth before the sun’s.
And Love hath his effect in gentleness
Of very self; even as
Within the middle fire the heat’s excess.

“The fire of Love comes to the gentle heart
Like as its virtue to a precious stone;
To which no star its influence can impart
Till it is made a pure thing by the sun:
For when the sun hath smit
From out its essence that which there was vile,
The star endoweth it.
And so the heart created by God’s breath
Pure, true, and clean from guile,
A woman, like a star, enamoreth.

“In gentle heart Love for like reason is
For which the lamp’s high flame is fanned and bowed:
Clear, piercing bright, it shines for its own bliss;
Nor would it burn there else, it is so proud.
For evil natures meet
With Love as it were water met with fire,
As cold abhorring heat.
Through gentle heart Love doth a track divine⁠—
Like knowing like; the same
As diamond runs through iron in the mine.

“The sun strikes full upon the mud all day;
It remains vile, nor the sun’s worth is less.
‘By race I am gentle,’ the proud man doth say:
He is the mud, the sun is gentleness.
Let no man predicate
That aught the name of gentleness should have,
Even in a king’s estate,
Except the heart there be a gentle man’s.
The star-beam lights the wave⁠—
Heaven holds the star and the star’s radiance.

“God, in the understanding of high Heaven,
Burns more than in our sight the living sun:
There to behold His Face unveiled is given;
And Heaven, whose will is homage paid to One,
Fulfils the things which live
In God, from the beginning excellent.
So should my lady give
That truth which in her eyes is glorified,
On which her heart is bent,
To me whose service waiteth at her side.

“My lady, God shall ask, ‘What daredst thou?’
(When my soul stands with all her acts reviewed;)
‘Thou passedst Heaven, into My sight, as now,
To make Me of vain love similitude.
To Me doth praise belong,
And to the Queen of all the realm of grace
Who endeth fraud and wrong.’
Then may I plead: ‘As though from Thee he came,
Love wore an angel’s face:
Lord, if I loved her, count it not my shame.’ ”

↩

Hypsipyle was discovered and rescued by her sons Eumenius and Thoas, (whose father was the “bland Jason,” as Statius calls him,) just as King Lycurgus in his great grief was about to put her to death for neglecting the care of his child, who through her neglect had been stung by a serpent.

Statius, Thebaid, V 949, says it was Tydeus who saved Hysipyle:⁠—

“But interposing Tydeus rushed between,
And with his shield protects the Lemnian queen.”

↩

In the old Romance languages the name of prosa was applied generally to all narrative poems, and particularly to the monorhythmic romances. Thus Gonzalo de Bercéo, a Spanish poet of the thirteenth century, begins a poem on the Vida del Glorioso Confessor Santo Domingo de Silos:⁠—

“De un confessor Sancto quiero fer una prosa,
Quiero fer una prosa en roman paladino,
En qual suele el pueblo fablar á su vecino,
Ca non so tan letrado per fer otro Latino.”

↩

Gerault de Berneil of Limoges, born of poor parents, but a man of talent and learning, was one of the most famous Troubadours of the thirteenth century. The old Provençal biographer, quoted by Raynouard, Choix de Poésies, V 166, says:⁠—

“He was a better poet than any who preceded or followed him, and was therefore called the Master of the Troubadours.⁠ ⁠… He passed his winters in study, and his summers in wandering from court to court with two minstrels who sang his songs.”

The following specimen of his poems