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The plunging torrent rushed on from here to tear out the heavy rock and form the next chamber, known as Dante's Inferno, whence, its force being divided, it went more gently in various directions.
By the way, I spoke far too disparagingly of your lines, and, I am ashamed to say. purposely, I should like you to specify or particularize; the story of the "Tottering Eld," of "his eventful years all come and gone," is too general; why not make him a soldier, or some character, however, in which he has been witness to frequency of "cruel wrong and strange distress"? I think I should, When I laughed at the "miserable man crawling from beneath the coverture," I wonder I did not perceive it was a laugh of horror, such as I have laughed at Dante's picture of the famished Ugolino.
Perhaps it is because women must feel most acutely that society never permits them to retrieve, or, what is much the same, takes no cognisance of their repentance, be it ever so sincere: their station once lost is never to be regained; it would seem as if Dante's inscription on the gates of Hell were to be for ever their motto "All hope abandon."
Is it possible to test a poet's greatness by the largeness of his 'view of life'? How wide, one would like to know, was Milton's 'view of humanity'? And, though Wordsworth's sense of the position of man in the universe was far more profound than Dante's, who will venture to assert that he was the greater poet?
But this dull, dark autumn day of thaw and rain, when the very clouds seem too spiritless and languid to storm outright or take themselves out of the way of fair weather; wet beneath and above; reminding one of that rayless atmosphere of Dante's Third Circle, where the infernal Priessnitz administers his hydropathic torment, "A heavy, cursed, and relentless drench, The land it soaks is putrid;"
She felt her arm seized firmly, and herself dragged swiftly within the shelter of the threshold. Her senses, overwrought by the terrible adventure which she had just gone through, were threatening to reel; she heard the massive door close, shutting out the yells of baffled rage, the ironical laughter, the obscene words, which sounded in her ears like the shrieks of Dante's damned.
Wherefore I will first tell how it had place in her departure, and then I will assign some reason why this number was so friendly to her. We translate in full the passage given above, as one of the most striking illustrations of Dante's youthful fondness for seeking for the mystical relations and inner meanings of things.
Who Beatrice was is again a mystery, but it has been agreed to consider her in real life a daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine and the founder of the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, one of whose descendants commissioned Hugo van der Goes to paint the great triptych in the Uffizi. Of Dante's rapt adoration of his lady, the "Vita Nuova" tells.
"Here was a woe too deep for tears; and I must look with dry eyes or I should fail to see. Have you ever noticed the searching dry gaze of the poor? It is like the seeing, wistful look of a child which few can bear without flinching. I had no need to read Dante's imaginary 'Inferno. I was living in a real one which made all imagination seem trivial.
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