But him who sits there and degenerates) Not to dispense or two or three for six, Not fortune of first vacancy,

any

Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,

He asked for, but against the errant world
Permission to do battle for the seed,

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Of which these four and twenty plants surround

thee.

Then with the doctrine and the will together,

With office apostolical he moved,

Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses; And in among the shoots heretical

His impetus with greater fury smote, Wherever the resistance was the greatest. Of him were made thereafter divers runnels, Whereby the garden catholic is watered, So that more living its plantations stand. If such the one wheel of the Biga was,

In which the Holy Church itself defended

And in the field its civic battle

won,

Truly full manifest should be to thee

The excellence of the other, unto whom
Thomas so courteous was before my coming.

But still the orbit, which the highest part

Of its circumference made, is derelict,

So that the mould is where was once the crust.
His family, that had straight forward moved

With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
So that they set the point upon the heel.
And soon aware they will be of the harvest

Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
Complain the granary is taken from them.

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Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf

Our volume through, would still some page discover Where he could read, I am as I am wont.' 'T will not be from Casal nor Acquasparta, From whence come such unto the written word 125 That one avoids it, and the other narrows. Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life

Am I, who always in great offices
Postponed considerations sinister.
Here are Illuminato and Agostino,

Who of the first barefooted beggars were
That with the halter friends of God became.

Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,

And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain, Who down below in volumes twelve is shining; Nathan the seer, and metropolitan

Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art; Here is Rabanus, and beside me here

Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim, He with the spirit of prophecy endowed. To celebrate so great a paladin

Have moved me the impassioned courtesy Of Fra Tommaso, and his speech discreet ; And with me they have moved this company.

Line 132. That with the cord the friends of God became.
Line 144. And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas;

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CANTO XIII

LET him imagine, who would well conceive
What now I saw, and let him while I speak
Retain the image as a steadfast rock,
The fifteen stars, that in their divers regions
The sky enliven with a light so great
That it transcends all clusters of the air;
Let him the Wain imagine unto which
Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day,
So that in turning of its pole it fails not;
Let him the mouth imagine of the horn
That in the point beginneth of the axis

ΙΟ

Round about which the primal wheel revolves,— To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven, Like unto that which Minos' daughter made, The moment when she felt the frost of death; And one to have its rays within the other,

And both to whirl themselves in such a manner
That one should forward go, the other backward;
And he will have some shadowing forth of that
True constellation and the double dance
That circled round the point at which I was;
.Because it is as much beyond our wont,

As swifter than the motion of the Chiana
Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.
There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,
But in the divine nature Persons three,
And in one person the divine and human.

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The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure,
And unto us those holy lights gave heed,
Growing in happiness from care to care.
Then broke the silence of those saints concordant
The light in which the admirable life

Of God's own mendicant was told to me,
And said: "Now that one straw is trodden out,
Now that its seed is garnered up already,
Sweet love invites me to thresh out the other.
Into that bosom, thou believest, whence

Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek
Whose taste to all the world is costing dear,
And into that which, by the lance transfixed,
Before and since, such satisfaction made
That it weighs down the balance of all sin,
Whate'er of light it has to human nature

Been lawful to possess, was all infused
By the same power that both of them created;
And hence at what I said above dost wonder,
When I narrated that no second had

The good which in the fifth light is enclosed.
Now ope thine eyes to what I answer thee,

And thou shalt see thy creed and my discourse
Fit in the truth as centre in a circle.
That which can die, and that which dieth not,

Are nothing but the splendor of the idea
Which by his love our Lord brings into being;
Because that living Light, which from its fount
Effulgent flows, so that it disunites not

From Him nor from the Love in them intrined,

Through its own goodness reunites its rays

In nine subsistences, as in a mirror,

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Itself eternally remaining One.
Thence it descends to the last potencies,
Downward from act to act becoming such
That only brief contingencies it makes;
And these contingencies I hold to be

Things generated, which the heaven produces
By its own motion, with seed and without.
Neither their wax, nor that which tempers it,
Remains immutable, and hence beneath

The ideal signet more and less shines through;
Therefore it happens, that the selfsame tree
After its kind bears worse and better fruit,
And ye are born with characters diverse.
If in perfection tempered were the wax,

And were the heaven in its supremest virtue,
The brilliance of the seal would all appear;

But nature gives it evermore deficient,

In the like manner working as the artist,

Who has the skill of art and hand that trembles.

If then the fervent Love, the Vision clear,
Of primal Virtue do dispose and seal,
Perfection absolute is there acquired.
Thus was of old the earth created worthy
Of all and every animal perfection;
And thus the Virgin was impregnate made;
So that thine own opinion I commend,

That human nature never yet has been,
Nor will be, what it was in those two persons.
Now if no farther forth I should proceed,
Then in what way was he without a peer
Would be the first beginning of thy words.
may well appear what now appears. not,

But, that

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