the wide sense of that word; for pilgrims
may be understood in two ways,--one wide, and one narrow. In the wide,
whoever is out of his own country is so far a pilgrim; in the narrow
use, by pilgrim is meant he only who goes to or returns from the house
of St. James.[R] Moreover, it is to be known that those who travel in
the service of the Most High are called by three distinct terms. Those
who go beyond the sea, whence often they bring back the palm, are called
_palmers_. Those who go to the house of Galicia are called _pilgrims_,
because the burial-place of St. James was more distant from his country
than that of any other of the Apostles. And those are called _romei_ who
go to Rome, where these whom I call pilgrims were going.

[Footnote R: The shrine of St. James, at Compostella, (contracted from
_Giacomo Apostolo_,) in Galicia, was a great resort of pilgrims during
the Middle Ages,--and Santiago, the military patron of Spain, was one of
the most popular saints of Christendom. Chaucer says, the Wif of Bathe

"Had passed many a straunge streem;
At Rome sche hadde ben, and at Boloyne,
In Galice at Seynt Jame, and at Coloyne."

And Shakspeare, in _All's Well that Ends Well_, makes Helena represent
herself as "St. Jacques's pilgrim."]

"O pilgrims, who in pensive mood move
slow,
Thinking perchance of those who absent
are,
Say, do ye come from land away so far
As your appearance seems to us to show?

"For ye weep not, the while ye forward go
Along the middle of the mourning town,
Seeming as persons who have nothing
known
Concerning the sad burden of her woe.

"If, through your will to hear, your steps ye
stay,
Truly my sighing heart declares to me
That ye shall afterwards depart in tears.

"For she[S] her Beatrice hath lost: and ye
Shall know, the words that man of her
may say
Have power to make weep whoever
hears."

[Footnote S: The city.]

Some time after this sonnet was written, two ladies sent to Dante,
asking him for some of his rhymes. That he might honor their request, he
wrote a new sonnet and sent it to them with two that he had previously
composed. In his new sonnet, he told how his thought mounted to heaven,
as a pilgrim, and beheld his lady in such condition of glory as could
not be comprehended by his intellect; for our intellect, in regard to
the souls of the blessed, is as weak as our eyes are to th