Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/268

248 them. From the similarity between this poem and the lines of Dante, one might infer that the two friends had discussed the matter in conversation, and afterwards that each had written out their common thought.

Cavalcanti's Song of Fortune, as translated by Rossetti, Early Italian Poets, p. 366, runs as follows:—

"Lo! I am she who makes the wheel to turn;

Lo! I am she who gives and takes away;

Blamed idly, day by day,

In all mine acts by you, ye humankind.

For whoso smites his visage and doth mourn,

What time he renders back my gifts to me,

Learns then that I decree

No state which mine own arrows may not find.

Who clomb must fall:—this bear ye well in mind,

Nor say, because he fell, I did him wrong.

Yet mine is a vain song:

For truly ye may find out wisdom when

King Arthur's resting-place is found of men.

"Ye make great marvel and astonishment

What time ye see the sluggard lifted up

And the just man to drop,

And ye complain on God and on my sway.

O humankind, ye sin in your complaint:

For He, that Lord who made the world to live,

Lets me not take or give

By mine own act, but as he wills I may.

Yet is the mind of man so castaway,

That it discerns not the supreme behest.

Alas! ye wretchedest,

And chide ye at God also? Shall not He

Judge between good and evil righteously?

"Ah! had ye knowledge how God evermore,

With agonies of soul and grievous heats,

As on an anvil beats

On them that in this earth hold high estate,—

Ye would choose little rather than much store,

And solitude than spacious palaces;

Such is the sore disease

Of anguish that on all their days doth wait.

Behold if they be not unfortunate,

When oft the father dares not trust the son!

O wealth, with thee is won

A worm to gnaw forever on his soul

Whose abject life is laid in thy control!

"If also ye take note what piteous death

They ofttimes make, whose hoards were manifold,

Who cities had and gold

And multitudes of men beneath their hand;

Then he among you that most angereth

Shall bless me saying, 'Lo! I worship thee

That I was not as he

Whose death is thus accurst throughout the land.'

But now your living souls are held in band

Of avarice, shutting you from the true light

Which shows how sad and slight

Are this world's treasured riches and array

That still change hands a hundred times a day.

"For me,—could envy enter in my sphere,

Which of all human taint is clean and quit,—

I well might harbor it

When I behold the peasant at his toil.

Guiding his team, untroubled, free from fear,

He leaves his perfect furrow as he goes,

And gives his field repose

From thorns and tares and weeds that vex the soil:

Thereto he labors, and without turmoil

Entrusts his work to God, content if so

Such guerdon from it grow

That in that year his family shall live:

Nor care nor thought to other things will give.

"But now ye may no more have speech of me,

For this mine office craves continual use:

Ye therefore deeply muse

Upon those things which ye have heard the while:

Yea, and even yet remember heedfully

How this my wheel a motion hath so fleet,