thee not!' I was like the bird in the fable, who
thought the fine day was to last for ever. What I should have done in my
latter days to make up for the imperfect amends of my repentance, I know
not, if the holy Piero Pettignano had not assisted me with his prayers.
But who art thou that goest with open eyes, and breathest in thy talk?"

"Mine eyes," answered Dante, "may yet have to endure the blindness in
this place, though for no long period. Far more do I fear the sufferings
in the one that I have just left. I seem to feel the weight already upon
me."[29]

The Florentine then informed Sapia how he came thither, which, she said,
was a great sign that God loved him; and she begged his prayers. The
conversation excited the curiosity of two spirits who overheard it; and
one of them, Guido del Duca, a noble Romagnese, asked the poet of
what country he was. Dante, without mentioning the name of the river,
intimated that he came from the banks of the Arno; upon which the other
spirit, Rinier da Calboli, asked his friend why the stranger suppressed
the name, as though it was something horrible. Guido said he well might;
for the river, throughout its course, beheld none but bad men and
persecutors of virtue. First, he said, it made its petty way by the
sties of those brutal hogs, the people of Casentino, and then arrived at
the dignity of watering the kennels of the curs of Arezzo, who excelled
more in barking than in biting; then, growing unluckier as it grew
larger, like the cursed and miserable ditch that it was, it found in
Florence the dogs become wolves; and finally, ere it went into the sea,
it passed the den of those foxes, the Pisans, who were full of such
cunning that they held traps in contempt.

"It will be well," continued Guido, "for this man to remember what he
hears;" and then, after prophesying evil to Florence, and confessing to
Dante his sin of envy, which used to make him pale when any one looked
happy, he added, "This is Rinieri, the glory of that house of Calboli
which now inherits not a spark of it. Not a spark of it, did I say, in
the house of Calboli? Where is there a spark in all Romagna? Where is
the good Lizio?--where Manardi, Traversaro, Carpigna? The Romagnese have
all become bastards. A mechanic founds a house in Bologna! a Bernardin
di Fosco finds his dog-grass become a tree in Faenza! Wonder not,
Tuscan, to see me weep, when I think of the noble spirits that we have
lived with--of the Guido