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

on either side of the street were evidently of a comparatively modern date; but others were of the oldest, and the sculptured stone wreaths over the doorways, and the remains of artistic ironwork in the balconies, showed them to have been once of some consideration. Some dirty children were playing at the door of a shop where fagots and charbon de terre de Paris were sold. A coachman in glazed hat sat asleep on his box before the shop of a blanchisseuse de fin. A woman in a bookbinder’s window was folding the sheets of a French grammar. In an angle of the houses under the high wall of the hospital garden was a cobbler’s stall. A stout, red-faced woman, standing before it, seeing me gazing round, asked if Monsieur was seeking anything in special. I said I was only looking at the old street; it must be very old. ‘Yes, one of the oldest in Paris.’ ‘And why is it called “du Fouarre”?’ ‘O, that is the old French for foin; and hay used to be sold here. Then, there were famous schools here in the old days; Abelard used to lecture here.’ I was delighted to find the traditions of the place still surviving, though I cannot say whether she was right about Abelard, whose name may have become merely typical; it is not improbable, however, that he may have made and annihilated many a man of straw, after the fashion of the doctors of dialectics, in the Fouarre. His house was not far off on the Quai Napoléon in the Cité; and that of the Canon Fulbert on the corner of the Rue Basse des Ursins. Passing through to the Pont au Double, I stopped to look at the books on the parapet, and found a voluminous Dictionnaire Historique, but, oddly enough, it contained neither Sigier’s name, nor Abelard’s. I asked a ruddy-cheeked boy on a doorstep if he went to school. He said he worked in the daytime, and went to an evening school in the Rue du Fouarre, No. 5. That primary night school seems to be the last feeble descendant of the ancient learning. As to straw, I saw none except a kind of rude straw matting placed round the corner of a wine-shop at the entrance of the street; a sign that oysters are sold within, they being brought to Paris in this kind of matting.”

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Buti interprets thus:⁠—

“Lecturing on the Elenchi of Aristotle, to prove some truths he formed certain syllogisms so well and artfully, as to excite envy.”

Others interpret the word invidiosi in the Latin sense of odious⁠—truths that were odious to somebody; which interpretation is supported by the fact that Sigier was summoned before the primate of the Dominicans on suspicion of heresy, but not convicted. ↩

Milton, “At a Solemn Mustek”:⁠—

“Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven’s joy;
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse;
Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
And to our high-raised fantasy present
That undisturbed song of pure concent,
Aye sung before the sapphire-colored throne
To Him that sits thereon,
With saintly shout, and solemn jubilee;
Where the bright Seraphim, in burning row,
Their loud uplifted angel trumpets blow;
And the cherubic host, in thousand quires,
Touch their immortal harps of golden wires,
With those just spirits that wear victorious palms,
Hymns devout and holy psalms
Singing everlastingly:
That we on earth, with undiscording voice,
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportioned sin
Jarred against Nature’s chime, and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
In perfect diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good.
O, may we soon again renew that song,
And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere-long
To his celestial concert us unite,
To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light!”

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The Heaven of the Sun continued. The praise of St. Francis by Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican. ↩

Lucretius, Nature of Things, Book II i, Good’s Tr.:⁠—

“How sweet to stand, when tempests tear the main,
On the firm cliff, and mark the seaman’s toil!
Not that another’s danger soothes the soul,
But from such toil how sweet to feel secure!
How sweet, at distance from the strife, to view
Contending hosts, and hear the clash of war!
But sweeter far on Wisdom’s heights serene,
Upheld by Truth, to fix our firm abode;
To watch the giddy crowd that, deep below,
Forever wander in pursuit of bliss;
To mark the strife for honors and renown,
For wit and wealth, insatiate, ceaseless urged
Day after day, with labor unrestrained.”

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Thomas Aquinas. ↩

The spirits see the thoughts of men in God, as in Canto VIII 87:⁠—

“Because I am assured the lofty joy
Thy speech infuses into me, my Lord,
Where every good thing doth begin and end,
Thou seest as I see it.”

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Canto X 94:⁠—

“The holy flock
Which Dominic conducteth by a road
Where well one fattens if he strayeth not.”

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Canto X 112:⁠—

“Where knowledge
So deep was put, that, if the true be true,
To see so much there never rose a second.”

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The Church. Luke 23:46:⁠—

“And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit; and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.”

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Romans 8:38:⁠—

“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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St. Francis and St. Dominic. Mr. Perkins, Tuscan Sculptors, I 7, says:⁠—

“In warring against Frederic, whose courage, cunning, and ambition gave them ceaseless cause for alarm, and in strengthening and extending the