Page:On translating Homer. Last words. A lecture given at Oxford.djvu/45

34 him through Hell, and he goes on:

‘Thence hath his comforting aid led me up, climbing and circling the Mountain which straightens you whom the world made crooked.’ These last words, ‘la Montagna che drizza voi che il mondo fece torti,’—‘the Mountain which straightens you whom the world made crooked,’—for the Mountain of Purgatory, I call an excellent specimen of the grand style in severity, where the poet’s mind is too full charged to suffer him to speak more explicitly. But the very next stanza is a beautiful specimen of the grand style in simplicity, where a noble nature and a poetical gift unite to utter a thing with the most limpid plainness and clearness:

‘So long,’ Dante continues, ‘so long he (Virgil) saith he will bear me company, until I shall be there where Beatrice is; there it behoves that without him I remain.’ But the noble simplicity of that in the Italian no words of mine can render.

Both these styles, the simple and the severe, are truly grand; the severe seems, perhaps, the grandest, so long as we attend most to the great personality,