Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/247

Rh and less imaginative process to leave it vague than to define it. Imagination is always the seeing and asserting faculty; that which obscures or conceals may be judgment, or feeling, but not invention. The invention, whether good or bad, is in the accurate engineering, not in the fog and uncertainty."

18. Aristotle says: "The good of the intellect is the highest beatitude"; and Dante in the Convito: "The True is the good of the intellect." In other words, the knowledge of God is intellectual good.

"It is a most just punishment," says St. Augustine, "that man should lose that freedom which man could not use, yet had power to keep, if he would, and that he who had knowledge to do what was right, and did not do it, should be deprived of the knowledge of what was right; and that he who would not do righteously, when he had the power, should lose the power to do it when he had the will."

22. The description given of the Mouth of Hell by Frate Alberico, Visio, 9, is in the grotesque spirit of the Mediæval Mysteries.

"After all these things, I was led to the Tartarean Regions, and to the mouth of the Infernal Pit, which seemed like unto a well; regions full of horrid darkness, of fetid exhalations, of shrieks and loud howlings. Near this Hell there was a Worm of immeasurable size, bound with a huge chain, one end of which seemed to be fastened in Hell. Before the mouth of this Hell there stood a great multitude of souls, which he absorbed at once, as if they were flies; so that, drawing in his breath, he swallowed them all together; then, breathing, exhaled them all on fire, like sparks."

36. The reader will here be reminded of Bunyan's town of Fair-speech.

"Christian. Pray who are your kindred there, if a man may be so bold.

"By-ends. Almost the whole town; and in particular my Lord Turnabout, my Lord Timeserver, my Lord Fair-speech, from whose ancestors that town first took its name; also Mr. Smooth-man, Mr, Facing-both-ways, Mr. Anything,—and the parson of our parish, Mr. Two-tongues, was my mother's own brother by father's side

"There Christian stepped a little aside to his fellow Hopeful, saying, 'It runs in my mind that this is one By-ends of Fair-speech; and if it be he, we have as very a knave in our company as dwelleth in all these parts.

42. Many commentators and translators interpret alcuna in its usual signification of some: "For some glory the damned would have from them." This would be a reason why these pusillanimous ghosts should not be sent into the profounder abyss, but no reason why they should not be received there. This is strengthened by what comes afterwards, l. 63. These souls were "hateful to God, and to his enemies." They were not good enough for Heaven, nor bad enough for Hell. "So then,