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Even on battle-fields, where the voice of this genius is wont to be loudest, they hear only the sound of their own voices; they meet there only their own dull and pedantic thoughts, as the old grammarian Brunetto Latini met on the plain of Roncesvalles a poor student riding on a bay mule. This was not always the case with Paul Flemming, but it had become so now.
So I spoke in my impatience, and made as if to go; but Guido caught me by the sleeve and restrained me, saying, "Why, here, as I think, he comes, by way of the bridge." Now, even as he spoke, I looked where he looked, and whom should I see coming toward us on the shady side of the bridge than this very lad we were talking of, and with him Messer Brunetto, the great scholar.
Messer Brunetto looked sour. "Who shall say? Who shall guess?" he answered, fretfully. "Your peacock is a vain bird with a harsh voice." Dante seemed to pay no heed to the impatience or the disdain of his master. He went on talking as if he were talking to himself, or to some congenial companion such as I would be.
Perhaps nobody is at heart fool enough to believe that life is at the mercy of temperature: Dante was not troubled by the objection that Brunetto could not have lived in the fire nor Ugolino in the ice. But the physicists found their intellectual vision of the world incommunicable to those who were not born with it.
I have no more to do with women. What woman is as fair as philosophy, as winsome as wisdom?" Messer Brunetto beamed on him with an admiring smile. "Right, my son, right!" he cried, delighted. "Better Seneca for you than sensuality; Virgilius than venery. When you are as ripe as I, you may trifle awhile if you like with lightness."
For an age which laid so much stress on artificial form in poetry, these verses of Brunetto mark the beginning of a new epoch.84 About the same time, or even in the first half of the thirteenth century, one of the many strictly balanced forms of mere, in which Europe was then so fruitful, became a normal and recognized form in Italy the sonnet.
Dante punishes Francesca, Pier delle Vigne, and Brunetto Latini, but he shows no personal horror of them; in the one case his moral instinct refrains from censuring the comparatively innocent, in the other it has ceased to revolt from the really infamous.
And the first I heard him say was this, in a grave voice, "Forgive me for lingering, Master; I was listening to the Song of the River." And Messer Brunetto echoed, in surprise: "The Song of the River! What in the name of all the ancients is the Song of the River?"
But with all respect to Messer Brunetto, I would maintain that no city of Heathendom or Christendom could be more beautiful than Florence at any season of the year. What if it be now and then windy; now and then chilly; now and then dusty? I have talked with a traveller that told me he had found the winters mighty bitter in Greece.
If, then, a native of Amalfi did not evolve the idea of the compass out of his own brain, at least it was the old Republic which first impressed the Western world with its immense value, and this, too, at a far earlier period than the date usually assigned to Gioja’s “discovery.” For a Christian bishop of Jerusalem a hundred years before Gioja’s day makes mention of the compass as being in common use amongst the Saracens of Palestine, whilst its existence was certainly known to Brunetto Latini, the tutor of Dante, whom for certain moral failings upon earth his brilliant pupil somewhat harshly places in the infernal regions.
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