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I cannot dismiss this part of the subject without advising every person who can muster sufficient Italian to read the simile of the sheep, in the third canto of the Purgatorio. I think it the most perfect passage of the kind in the world, the most imaginative, the most picturesque, and the most sweetly expressed.
The boat with the name that pleased me best was not there. Peppino told me about it: it belonged to him before the money came from America and he used it to ferry tourists across the bay and into the bowels of the promontory through the mouth of a grotto where the reflected lights are lovely on a sunny day; he called it the Anime del Purgatorio.
Here was, indeed, a man not of words but of deeds; one who spoke not mere phrases coined from the imaginings of the brain, but one who had seen and heard and throbbed; had looked unappalled into the depths and the abysses of human life, and the dreadest political experiences; one who had visited the Purgatorio and conversed with the lost or the tortured souls, and come back from the pilgrimage with words of hope, faith, and charity.
After Dante had written his Purgatorio, he retired to the picturesque mountains which separate Tuscany from Modena and Bologna; and in the hospitium of an ancient monastery, "on the woody summit of a rock from which he might gaze on his ungrateful country, he renewed his studies in philosophy and theology."
"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.
He took down a volume of Dante, and pretended to be deeply interested in the Purgatorio, though he knew not a word he was reading, as Marionetta was well aware; who, tripping across the room, peeped into his book, and said to him, 'I see you are in the middle of Purgatory. 'I am in the middle of hell, said Scythrop furiously.
The three kingdoms, Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another like compartments of a great edifice; a great supernatural world-cathedral, piled up there, stern, solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls! It is, at bottom, the sincerest of all Poems; sincerity, here too, we find to be the measure of worth.
A friend of Lord Hollybridge had picked it up for him in some obscure place in Northern Italy, and had not yet submitted it to an expert. Avice, it appeared, had recognised it as representing Leah and Rachel, as Action and Contemplation in the last books of Dante's PURGATORIO, with the mystic griffin car in the distance.
Nay, the passage in the 'Purgatorio' where the shadows from the morning sunshine make the flames redder, reaches the accuracy of Newtonian science; and does Giotto, think you, all the while, see nothing of the sort? The fact was, he saw light so intensely that he never for an instant thought of painting it.
"L' altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia Della sua palma, sospirando, letto." Purgatorio, vii. When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome.
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