"And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed
Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since
Of fairy damsels met in forest wide
By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,
Lancelot, or Palleas, or Pellenore."
89. In the original, l' aer perso, the perse air. Dante, Convito, IV. 20, defines perse as "a color mixed of purple and black, but the black predominates." Chaucer's "Doctour of Phisike" in the Canterbury Tales, Prologue 441, wore this color:—
"In sanguin and in perse he clad was alle, Lined with taffata and with sendalle."
The Glossary defines it, "skie colored, of a bluish gray." The word is again used, VII. 103, and [[../../Volume 2/Canto 9|Purg. IX.]] 97.
97. The city of Ravenna. "One reaches Ravenna," says Ampère, Voyage Dantesque, p. 311, "by journeying along the borders of a pine forest, which is seven leagues in length, and which seemed to me an immense funereal wood, serving as an avenue to the common tomb of those two great powers, Dante and the Roman Empire in the West. There is hardly room for any other memories than theirs. But other poetic names are attached to the Pine Woods of Ravenna. Not long ago Lord Byron evoked there the fantastic tales borrowed by Dryden from Boccaccio, and now he is himself a figure of the past, wandering in this melancholy place. I thought, in traversing it, that the singer of despair had ridden along this melancholy shore, trodden before him by the graver and slower footstep of the poet of the Inferno."
99. Quoting this line, Ampère remarks, Voyage Dantesque, p. 312: "We have only to cast our eyes upon the map to recognize the topographical exactitude of this last expression. In fact, in all the upper part of its course, the Po receives a multitude of affluents, which converge towards its bed. They are the Tessino, the Adda, the Olio, the Mincio, the Trebbia, the Bormida, the Taro;—names which recur so often in the history of the wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries."
103. Here the word love is repeated, as the word honor was in Canto IV. 72. The verse murmurs with it, like the "moan of doves in immemorial elms."
St. Augustine says in his Confessions, III. 1: "I loved not yet, yet I loved to love. . . . . I sought what I might love, in love with loving."
104. I think it is Coleridge who says: "The desire of man is for the woman, but the desire of woman is for the desire of man."
107. Caïna is in the lowest circle of the Inferno, where fratricides are punished.
116. Francesca, daughter of Guido da Polenta, Lord of Ravenna, and wife of Gianciotto Malatesta, son of the Lord of Rimini. The lover, Paul Malatesta, was the brother of the husband, who, discovering their amour, put them both to death with his own hand.
Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, Lect. III., says:—
"Dante's painting is not graphic only, brief, true, and of a vividness as
