The Divine Comedy (Illustrated Edition). Dante Alighieri

Читать онлайн книгу.

The Divine Comedy (Illustrated Edition) - Dante Alighieri


Скачать книгу
in this strain I answer’d: “Tell me now,

      What treasures from St. Peter at the first

      Our Lord demanded, when he put the keys

      Into his charge? Surely he ask’d no more

      Or gold or silver of Matthias took,

      When lots were cast upon the forfeit place

      Thy punishment of right is merited:

      And look thou well to that ill-gotten coin,

      If reverence of the keys restrain’d me not,

      Which thou in happier time didst hold, I yet

      Severer speech might use. Your avarice

      O’ercasts the world with mourning, under foot

      Treading the good, and raising bad men up.

      Of shepherds, like to you, th’ Evangelist

      Was ware, when her, who sits upon the waves,

      With kings in filthy whoredom he beheld,

      She who with seven heads tower’d at her birth,

      And from ten horns her proof of glory drew,

      Long as her spouse in virtue took delight.

      Of gold and silver ye have made your god,

      Diff’ring wherein from the idolater,

      But he that worships one, a hundred ye?

      Not thy conversion, but that plenteous dower,

      Which the first wealthy Father gain’d from thee!”

      Meanwhile, as thus I sung, he, whether wrath

      Or conscience smote him, violent upsprang

      Spinning on either sole. I do believe

      My teacher well was pleas’d, with so compos’d

      A lip, he listen’d ever to the sound

      Of the true words I utter’d. In both arms

      He caught, and to his bosom lifting me

      Upward retrac’d the way of his descent.

      Nor weary of his weight he press’d me close,

      Till to the summit of the rock we came,

      Our passage from the fourth to the fifth pier.

      His cherish’d burden there gently he plac’d

      Upon the rugged rock and steep, a path

      Not easy for the clamb’ring goat to mount.

      Thence to my view another vale appear’d

      Footnotes

      Canto XX

       Table of Contents

      ARGUMENT.—The Poet relates the punishment of such as presumed, while living, to predict future events. It is to have their faces reversed and set the contrary way on their limbs, so that, being deprived of the power to see before them, they are constrained ever to walk backward. Among these Virgil points out to him Amphiaraüs, Tiresias, Aruns, and Manto (from the mention of whom he takes occasion to speak of the origin of Mantua), together with several others, who had practised the arts of divination and astrology.

      AND now the verse proceeds to torments new,

      Fit argument of this the twentieth strain

      Of the first song, whose awful theme records

      The spirits whelm’d in woe. Earnest I look’d

      Into the depth, that open’d to my view,

      Moisten’d with tears of anguish, and beheld

      A tribe, that came along the hollow vale,

      In silence weeping: such their step as walk

      Quires chanting solemn litanies on earth.

      As on them more direct mine eye descends,

      Each wondrously seem’d to be revers’d

      At the neck-bone, so that the countenance

      Was from the reins averted: and because

      None might before him look, they were compell’d

      To’ advance with backward gait. Thus one perhaps

      Hath


Скачать книгу