Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/43

 DANTE 21 Black Cherubim of hell seizes and claims him, truly urging that absolution for an intended sin is a contradiction in terms, since absolution assumes penitence. Again, among the hypocrites in the sixth Bolgia, Dante sees men approach in dazzling cloaks, of which the hoods cover their eyes and face, like those worn by the monks of Cologne ; but he finds that they are crushing weights of gilded lead splendid semblance and agonizing, destroying reality. Again, when the two poets, Dante and Virgil, came to the Abyss of Evil-pits (Malebolge), down which the crimson stream of Phlegethon leaps in " a Niagara of blood," he is on the edge of the Circle of Fraud in all its varieties, down which they are to be carried on the back of Geryon, the triple-bodied serpent-monster, who is the type of all human and demonic falsity. 'And how is that monster to be evoked from the depth ? Dante is bidden to take off the cord which girds him the cord with which he had endeavored in old days to bind the spotted panther of sensual temptation and to fling it into the void profound. He does so, and the monster, type of the brutal and the human in our nature when both are false, .omes swimming and circling up from below. " The outward form " symbol* ized by the cord " when associated with unreality, only attracts the worst sym- bol of unreality." Once more, ere he begins to climb the steep terraces of the hill of Purgatory and true repentance, he has to be girt with a far different cord, even with a humble rush, the only plant which because it bows to the billows and the wind will grow among the beating waves of the sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory. That cord of rush is the type, not of outward pro- fession, but of humble sincerity. Dante, in his characteristic way, does not pause to explain any of these sym- bols to us. He leaves them to our own thought, but they all point to the one great lesson that God needs not the service of externalism, but the preparation of the heart. In 1292, probably at the wish of his friends, Dante married Gemma Donati, She bore him seven children in seven years, and there is nothing to show that she was not a true and faithful wife to him, though it is quite probable, from his absolute silence respecting her, that the deepest grounds of sympathy hardly ex- isted between them. About the time of his marriage he plunged more earnestly into politics, and became one of the Priori of Florence. He felt himself that a change for the worse had passed over his life. It was no longer so pure, so simple, so devout as it once had been. In the year 1300, the year of the Great Jubilee which had been preached by Pope Boniface VIII., he was in the mid-path of life, and was lost, as he allegorically describes it at the beginning of the " Inferno," in a wild and savage wood. He was hindered from ascending the sunny hill of heavenly aims by the speckled panther of sensuality, the gaunt, gray wolf of avaricious selfishness, and the fierce lion of wrath and ambitious pride. But he was re- stored to hope and effort by a vision of Beatrice, which seems to have come to him before his Easter communion, and fixed in his mind the purpose of writing about Beatrice in her ideal aspect of Divine Truth " what never was writ of woman."