I enter, and I see thee in the gloom

Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. The air is filled with some unknown perfume; The congregation of the dead make room

For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine; Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's groves of pine, The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. From the confessionals I hear arise

Rehearsals of forgotten tragedies,

And lamentations from the crypts below;
And then a voice celestial that begins

With the pathetic words, "Although your sins
As scarlet be," and ends with "as the snow."

With snow-white veil, and garments as of flame,
She stands before thee, who so long ago
Filled thy young heart with passion and the woe
From which thy song in all its splendors came;
And while with stern rebuke she speaks thy name,
The ice about thy heart melts as the snow
On mountain heights, and in swift overflow
Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame.
Thou makest full confession; and a gleam

As of the dawn on some dark forest cast,
Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase;
Lethe and Eunoë the remembered dream

And the forgotten sorrow-bring at last
That perfect pardon which is perfect peace.

I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze

With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side

No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise.

And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs
Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love
And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;
And the melodious bells among the spires

O'er all the house-tops and through heaven above
Proclaim the elevation of the Host!

O star of morning and of liberty!

O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!

The voices of the city and the sea,

The voices of the mountains and the pines,
Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines
Are footpaths for the thought of Italy!
Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights,
Through all the nations; and a sound is heard,
As of a mighty wind, and men devout,
Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes,

In their own language hear thy wondrous word,
And many are amazed and many doubt.

THE dates when the different books were written cannot be definitely fixed. Boccaccio's account of the finding of the first seven cantos of the Inferno may indicate that previous to his exile Dante had made notes and sketches which were afterwards worked into the Commedia. It is quite certain that the poem took shape between the death of Clement V. and the end of Dante's life. “From internal allusions (such as Clement's death, April 20th, 1314, in Inf. xix. 79; the failure of Henry VII., in Purg. vii. 96; the pontificate of John XXII., in Par. xxvii. 58), together with the evidence furnished by Dante's first eclogue to Giovanni del Virgilio,2 in which it appears that both the Inferno and the Purgatorio were completed in 1318 or 1319, and Boccaccio's story of the finding of the last thirteen cantos, it would seem that the Inferno and the Purgatorio were finished between 1314 and 1318 or 1319, the Paradiso between 1316 and Sept. 14th, 1321." 8

1 We do not know what name Dante intended to give the work. In the letter to Can Grande he calls it a "Comedy." Some editions style it "Le terza rime di Dante; "others the "Vision of Dante Alighieri." The title Divina Commedia appears in some of the earliest manuscripts.

2 Pp. 220, 221.

3 Dante, E. G. Gardner, in Temple Primers.

The date of the action of the poem is in the jubilee year 1300, when Dante was in his thirty-fifth year. His journey began on Good Friday and continued for a week, ending Thursday evening.

II. ITS STRUCTURE.1

There exists no poetical work elaborated with such consummate art as this. The smallest detail is worked out; it resembles a technical work, every iron joint, every nail of which has been considered before. Even the number of the words seems to have been counted. The mystical properties of numbers, on which such stress is laid in the Vita Nuova, where the number Nine, that of the miraculous, recurs ever and again, and Beatrice herself is called a Nine, that is, a wonder whose root is in the Trinity-these properties are worked out to the utmost in the structure of the Divine Comedy. The numbers Three, that of the threefold Deity, Nine, that of wonder and second birth, and Ten, the number of the Perfect, are the basis of its construction. Three are the rhymes, three verses form a stanza, three animals, rise to terrify Dante, three holy women intervene for him, three guides lead him. Three in number are the realms, and correspondingly the whole poem is divided into three parts; the book opens with an introductory canto, then follow ninety-nine cantos, thirty-three for each of the three realms, corresponding to the years of Christ's life on earth, so that the whole number of the cantos is an hundred, the number of the Whole. Each of the three realms is divided into ten regions: Hell into Limbo and the nine circles; Purgatory into

1 Dante and his Time, p. 270. Karl Federn. McClure, Phillips & Co.

three preparatory divisions and the seven circles of the capital sins; in Paradise there are nine heavens and as the tenth region the Heaver of perfect light, the Empyrean. Even verses and words seem to have been counted, for the number of the words is 99,542; and of verses Hell contains 4720, Purgatory 35 more, and Paradise again 3 more. And each of the three parts ends with the word "stars."

III. THE TERZA RIMA.1

Each canto is composed of from thirty-eight to fifty-three terzine or terzette, continuous measures of three normally hendecasyllabic lines, woven together by the rhymes of the middle lines, with an extra line or tornello rhyming with the second line of the last terzina to close the canto:

ABA, BCB, CDC, DED— XIX, YZYZ.

This terza rima seems to be derived from one of the rather numerous forms of the Italian serventese, or sermontese, a species of poem introduced from Provence in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The Provençal sirventes was a serviceable composition employed mainly for satirical, political, and ethical purposes, in contrast with the stately, and "tragical" canzone of Love. Although the Italians extended its range of subject and developed its metres, no one before Dante had used it for a great poem or had transfigured it into this superb new measure, at once lyrical and epical. In his hand, indeed, the "thing became a trumpet," sounding from earth to heaven, to call the dead to judgment.

1 Dante, E. G. Gardner, Temple Primers, p. 86.