Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/60

40 Justice of God, ah! who heaps up so many

New toils and sufferings as I beheld?

And why doth our transgression waste us so?

As doth the billow there upon Charybdis,

That breaks itself on that which it encounters,

So here the folk must dance their roundelay.

Here saw I people, more than elsewhere, many,

On one side and the other, with great howls,

Rolling weights forward by main-force of chest.

They clashed together, and then at that point

Each one turned backward, rolling retrograde,

Crying, "Why keepest?" and, "Why squanderest thou?"

Thus they returned along the lurid circle

On either hand unto the opposite point,

Shouting their shameful metre evermore.

Then each, when he arrived there, wheeled about

Through his half-circle to another joust;

And I, who had my heart pierced as it were,

Exclaimed: "My Master, now declare to me

What people these are, and if all were clerks,

These shaven crowns upon the left of us."

And he to me: "All of them were asquint

In intellect in the first life, so much

That there with measure they no spending made.