Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/251

Rh  inurbano ingrato ingratissimo.

Any one who is desirous of tracing out the presence of Paganism in Christianity will find the subject amply discussed by Middleton in his Letter from Rome.

109. Dryden's Aeneïs, B. VI.:—

112. Homer, Iliad, VI.: "As is the race of leaves, such is that of men; some leaves the wind scatters upon the ground, and others the budding wood produces, for they come again in the season of Spring. So is the race of men, one springs up and the other dies."

See also Note 82 of this canto.

Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. 160, says:—

"When Dante describes the spirits falling from the bank of Acheron 'as dead leaves flutter from a bough,' he gives the most perfect image possible of their utter lightness, feebleness, passiveness, and scattering agony of despair, without, however, for an instant losing his own clear perception that these are souls, and those are leaves: he makes no confusion of one with the other."

Shelley in his Ode to the West Wind inverts this image, and compares the dead leaves to ghosts:—

1. Dante is borne across the river Acheron in his sleep, he does not tell us how, and awakes on the brink of "the dolorous valley of the abyss." He now enters the First Circle of the Inferno; the Limbo of the Unbaptized, the border land, as the name denotes.

Frate Alberico in § 2 of his Vision says, that the divine punishments are tempered to extreme youth and old age.

"Man is first a little child, then grows and reaches adolescence, and attains to youthful vigor; and, little by little growing weaker, declines into old age; and at every step of life the sum of his sins increases. So likewise the little children are punished least, and more and more the adolescents and the youths; until, their sins decreasing with the long-continued torments, punishment also begins to decrease, as it by a kind of old age (veluti quadam senectute)."

10. Frate Alberico, in § 9: "The darkness was so dense and impenetrable that it was impossible to see anything there."

28. Mental, not physical pain; what