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 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 constructions 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 Heaven 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."

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:

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 Pro ́vence 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.

III

DANTE'S COSMOGRAPHY1

THE sacred documents of our religion are clear enough in expressing the dependent relation of the whole firmament to the earth. When the story of creation makes the Almighty say, "Let there be lights in the firmament of heaven, to divide the day from the night, and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years, and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth," or when Joshua commands, "Sun, stand thou still in Gibeon, and thou, moon, in the valley of Ajalon," we may talk, if we choose, of an "accommodation" to the human conceptions of those ancient days.

Not so, however, when we find the relation of all created things to the Creator determined by events which have taken place upon our earth, by the fall, the redemption, and the second coming of the Christ. The Saviour himself declares, "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." The Apostle Peter says yet more distinctly that “the heavens that now are, and the earth . . . have been stored up for fire, being reserved against the day of

1 Essays on Dante, by Dr. Karl Witte, trans. by C. Mabel Lawrence, and edited by Philip A. Wicksteed. Houghton, Mifflin & Co. The essay is found in Witte's Dante-Forschungen, vol. ii. pp. 161-182 (1878). The notes are Mr. Wicksteed's. (By permission.)

judgment and destruction of ungodly men ;" and further on he adds, "The heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall be dissolved with fervent heat, and the earth and the works that are therein shall be burned up." 66 But," he continues, according to His promise, we look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.'

66

In the Middle Ages all this was united with the special conceptions of ancient astronomy, which had taken its rise amongst the great Greek astronomers of the third century before Christ, and was systematized mainly by the Alexandrian Ptolemy in the second century of the Christian era, further details being added by Arabian scholars, especially under the Sassanid dynasty in Spain. The doubts which the Samian Aristarchus had already thrown on the central position of the earth were passed over by antiquity, just as they were by the Middle Ages when propounded by the celebrated Ibn Roschd, or Averroës as we are accustomed to call him, and a little later on by Alphonso the Wise, king of Castile.

Right down into the sixteenth century the conviction remained unshaken that the earth was fixed at the middle point of the universe. All the heavenly spheres circled round it as their centre. It was the lowest point of the universe, towards which all bodies possessing material weight were drawn. The two heavy elements formed the body of the earth and the two light ones encompassed it; for beyond the sphere of air lay that of fire, the true home of that element towards which all upleaping flames aspire, only being kept back by the matter on which they feed. From that high region of fire the thunderstorms tore off

fragments of the element, and hurled them to earth as lightning.

Far beyond the sphere of fire came the seven planets, each of which had a heaven to itself, the moon counting as the undermost of the planets. The sun was in the middle, between the three inner and the three outer planets, and although only reckoned as one of the planets, he was the source of light to the whole universe, for not only our earth, and the planets (as we also believe), but the fixed stars too received their light from him. Hence the poet calls him 1 "the greatest of all ministers of nature, who stamps the world with the virtue of the heaven, and gives the measure of time unto us."

Beyond Saturn (the most distant planet known till the year 1781) lay the heaven of the fixed stars. Attempts had been made to number them in early times. Eratosthenes counted 675, and for more than a thousand years science rested in Ptolemy's 1022— only about a fifth of the number now given as visible to the naked eye, and less than a hundredth of the number marked on our modern astronomical maps. According to Aristotle there was nothing beyond this eighth heaven. Each heaven had a "proper or special motion of its own, from west to east; and as the distance from the earth, the centre of the universe, increased, this movement became slower and slower, till the heaven of the fixed stars only revolved once in 36,000 years.

But the path of the planets as actually observed was not adequately expressed by their supposed revolution in company with the heavens called after their

1 Par. x. 28.