I

THE DIVINA COMMEDIA 1

OFT have I seen at some cathedral door

A laborer, pausing in the dust and heat,
Lay down his burden, and with reverent feet
Enter, and cross himself, and on the floor

Kneel to repeat his paternoster o'er ;

Far off the noises of the world retreat;
The loud vociferations of the street
Become an undistinguishable roar.
So, as I enter here from day to day,

And leave my burden at this minster gate,
Kneeling in prayer, and not ashamed to pray,
The tumult of the time disconsolate

To inarticulate murmurs dies away,

While the eternal ages watch and wait.

How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers!
This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves
Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves
Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers,
And the vast minster seems a cross of flowers!

But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves
Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves,
And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers!

Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,

What exultations trampling on despair,

What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, Uprose this poem of the earth and air,

This mediæval miracle of song!

1 Henry W. Longfellow. Taken from Longfellow's translation of The Divine Comedy, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

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." 3

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1 We do not know what name Dante intended to give the work. In the letter to Can Grande he calls it a 66 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.