Psalm 44:23:—
“Awake, why steepest thou, O Lord?”
Clement V of Gascony, made Pope in 1305, and John XXII of Cahors in France, in 1316. Buti makes the allusion more general:—
“They of Cahors and Gascony are preparing to drink the blood of the martyrs, because they were preparing to be Popes, cardinals, archbishops and bishops, and prelates in the Church of God, that is built with the blood of the martyrs.”
Dante alludes elsewhere to this intervention of Providence to save the Roman Empire by the hand of Scipio. Convito, IV 5, he says:—
“Is not the hand of God visible, when in the war with Hannibal, having lost so many citizens, that three bushels of rings were carried to Africa, the Romans would have abandoned the land, if that blessed youth Scipio had not undertaken the expedition to Africa, to secure its freedom?”
Boccaccio, “Ninfale d’ Ameto,” describing a battle between two flocks of swans, says the spectators “saw the air full of feathers, as when the nurse of Jove [Amalthaea, the Goat] holds Apollo, the white snow is seen to fall in flakes.”
And Whittier, Snowbound:—
“Unwarmed by any sunset light,
The gray day darkened into night,
A night made hoary with the swarm
And whirl-dance of the blinding storm,
As zigzag wavering to and fro
Crossed and recrossed the winged snow.”
When the sun is in Capricorn; that is, from the middle of December to the middle of January. ↩
The spirits described in Canto XXII 131, as
“The triumphant throng
That comes rejoicing through this rounded ether,”
and had remained behind when Christ and the Virgin Mary ascended. ↩
Till his sight could follow them no more, on account of the exceeding vastness of the space between. ↩
Canto XXII 133. ↩
The first climate is the torrid zone, the first from the equator. From midst to end, is from the meridian to the horizon. Dante had been, then, six hours in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars; for, as Milton says, Paradise Lost, V 580:—
“Time, though in eternity, applied
To motion, measures all things durable
By present, past, and future.”
Being now in the meridian of the Straits of Gibraltar, Dante sees to the westward of Cadiz the sea Ulysses sailed, when he turned his stern unto the morning and made his oars wings for his mad flight, as described in Inferno XXVI. ↩
Eastward he almost sees the Phoenician coast; almost, and not quite, because, say the commentators, it was already night there. ↩
Europa, daughter of King Agenor, borne to the island of Crete on the back of Jupiter, who had taken the shape of a bull.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, II, Addison’s Tr.:—
“Agenor’s royal daughter, as she played
Among the fields, the milk-white bull surveyed,
And viewed his spotless body with delight,
And at a distance kept him in her sight.
At length she plucked the rising flowers, and fed
The gentle beast, and fondly stroked his head.
⋮
Till now grown wanton and devoid of fear,
Not knowing that she pressed the Thunderer,
She placed herself upon his back, and rode
O’er fields and meadows, seated on the god.“He gently marched along, and by degrees
Left the dry meadow, and approached the seas;
Where now he dips his hoofs and wets his thighs,
Now plunges in, and carries off the prize.”
The sun was in Aries, two signs in advance of Gemini, in which Dante then was. ↩
Purgatorio XXXI 49:—
“Never to thee presented art or nature
Pleasure so great as the fair limbs wherein
I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth.”
The Gimini, or Twins, are Castor and Pollux, the sons of Leda. And as Jupiter, their father, came to her in the shape of a swan, this sign of the zodiac is called the nest of Leda. Dante now mounts up from the Heaven of the Fixed Stars to the Primum Mobile, or Crystalline Heaven. ↩
Dante’s desire to know in what part of this heaven he was. ↩
All the other heavens have their Regents or Intelligences. See Notes 1240. But the Primum Mobile has the Divine Mind alone. ↩
By that precinct Dante means the Empyrean, which embraces the Primum Mobile, as that does all the other heavens below it. ↩
The half of ten is five, and the fifth is two. The product of these, when multiplied together, is ten. ↩
Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality”:—
“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.”
Aurora, daughter of Hyperion, or the Sun. Purgatorio II 7:—
“So that the white and the vermilion cheeks
Of beautiful Aurora, where I was,
By too great age were changing into orange.”
Or, perhaps, to steer, and
“Over the high seas to keep
The barque of Peter to its proper bearings.”
This neglected centesimal was the omission
