Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/252

232 the French theologians call la peine du dam, the privation of the sight of God.

30. Virgil, Æneid, VI.: "Forthwith are heard voices, loud wailings, and weeping ghosts of infants, in the first opening of the gate; whom, bereaved of sweet life out of the course of nature, and snatched from the breast, a black day cut off, and buried in an untimely grave."

53. The descent of Christ into Limbo. Neither here nor elsewhere in the Inferno does Dante mention the name of Christ.

72. The reader will not fail to observe how Dante makes the word honor, in its various forms, ring and reverberate through these lines,—orrevol, onori, orranza, onrata, onorata!

86. Dante puts the sword into the hand of Homer as a symbol of his warlike epic, which is a Song of the Sword.

93. Upon this line Boccaccio, Comento, says: "A proper thing it is to honor every man, but especially those who are of one and the same profession, as these were with Virgil."

100. Another assertion of Dante's consciousness of his own power as a poet.

106. This is the Noble Castle of human wit and learning, encircled with its seven scholastic walls, the Trivium, Logic, Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Quadrivium, Arithmetic, Astronomy, Geometry, Music.

The fair rivulet is Eloquence, which Dante does not seem to consider a very profound matter, as he and Virgil pass over it as if it were dry ground.

118. Of this word "enamel" Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters, III. 227, remarks:—

"The first instance I know of its right use, though very probably it had been so employed before, is in Dante. The righteous spirits of the pre-Christian ages are seen by him, though in the Inferno, yet in a place open, luminous and high, walking upon the 'green enamel.'

"I am very sure that Dante did not use this phrase as we use it. He knew well what enamel was; and his readers, in order to understand him thoroughly, must remember what it is,—a vitreous paste, dissolved in water, mixed with metallic oxides, to give it the opacity and the color required, spread in a moist state on metal, and afterwards hardened by fire, so as never to change. And Dante means, in using this metaphor of the grass of the Inferno, to mark that it is laid as a tempering and cooling substance over the dark, metallic, gloomy ground; but yet so hardened by the fire, that it is not any more fresh or living grass, but a smooth, silent, lifeless bed of eternal green. And we know how hard Dante's idea of it was; because afterwards, in what is perhaps the most awful passage of the whole Inferno, when the three furies rise at the top of the burning tower, and, catching sight of Dante, and not being able to get at him, shriek wildly for the Gorgon to come up, too, that they may turn him into stone,