United States or Brazil ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The baroness's rooms were brilliantly lit up, but, thanks to the thick curtains which covered the windows, the lights could not be seen from the street, though several carriages were drawn up along the sidewalk. Opening into the elegant drawing-room was a not less elegant card room, appreciatively nicknamed the Inferno by the band.
"Without departing at all from natural forms, I thought to make it suggest the Purgatorio to anyone who remembered the description given of the place ab extra by Ulysses, in the end of the twenty-sixth canto of the Inferno. Of course, that thing there is a mere rock, yet it has certain mountain forms about it.
In the perpetual presence of this great Healing Agent, who stays the bleeding of wounds, who knits the fractured bone, who expels the splinter by a gentle natural process, who walls in the inflammation that might involve the vital organs, who draws a cordon to separate the dead part from the living, who sends his three natural anaesthetics to the over-tasked frame in due order, according to its need, sleep, fainting, death; in this perpetual presence, it is doubtless hard for the physician to realize the theological fact of a vast and permanent sphere of the universe, where no organ finds itself in its natural medium, where no wound heals kindly, where the executive has abrogated the pardoning power, and mercy forgets its errand; where the omnipotent is unfelt save in malignant agencies, and the omnipresent is unseen and unrepresented; hard to accept the God of Dante's "Inferno," and of Bunyan's caged lunatic.
For some time, Houston and Rutherford stood upon the rear platform, enjoying their cigars, and watching the strange phenomena of that weird region; on all sides, vast tracts of ashen gray or black, as if burnt to a crisp, with no sign of life, animal or vegetable, the lurid lights flashing and playing in the distance, until it seemed as though they might be gliding through the borderland of Dante's Inferno.
But the landing without the bedroom door looked down by a high-set window into the narrow Tertasse; and from this, though the door was shut, rose an inferno of noise, the clash of steel, the cries of the wounded, the shouts of the fighters.
But lest this conduct should appear too irresolute, he added the punishment of twenty-four hours in irons. A fellow seaman plucked up the heroism to demand that the incident be entered on the log for admiralty investigation and Coulter's only reply was to send the insurgent into the inferno of the stoke hold for an extra shift at the shovels.
Alternately crawling and working my way on hands and knees, and taking advantage of any little bit of cover, I drew nearer to the guns. While I was lying here, there crashed out a regular inferno of rifle-fire from the German trenches. The bullets sang overhead like a flight of hornets. This certainly was a warm corner.
A similar omission of a curious reference to Dante occurs in the comment on the 23d verse of Canto XXVII. of the "Inferno," where Benvenuto, speaking of the power of mental engrossment or moral affections to overcome physical pain, says, "As I, indeed, have seen a sick man cause the poem of Dante to be brought to him for relief from the burning pains of fever."
Many who boast of their church conformity, and that no one hears of their noise, may thank the ignorance of their minds for that kind of quietness. But by far the most powerful assault that ever was made upon lukewarmness in religion and upon self-seeking in the Church was delivered by Dante in the tremendous third canto of his Inferno:
The odors of that crowded steerage gangway, the pressing of the weary women, the wailing of the frightened babies, the cursing of the men, as time passed, made the place seem an inferno.
Word Of The Day