It is almost as bad as if she had said in
English, "Sophist I found myself, though Sophia is my name." It
is pleasant, however, to see the great saturnine poet among the
punsters.--It appears, from the commentators, that Sapia was in exile at
the time of the battle, but they do not say for what; probably from some
zeal of faction]

[Footnote 29: We are here let into Dante's confessions. He owns to a
little envy, but far more pride:

"Gli occhi, diss' io, mi fieno ancor qui tolti,
Ma picciol tempo; che poch' e l'offesa
Fatta per esser con invidia volti.
Troppa e piu la paura ond' e sospesa
L'anima mia del tormento di sotto
Che gia lo 'ncarco di la giu mi pesa."

The first confession is singularly ingenuous and modest; the second,
affecting. It is curious to guess what sort of persons Dante could have
allowed himself to envy--probably those who were more acceptable to
women.]

[Footnote 29: Aglauros, daughter of Cecrops, king of Athens, was turned
to stone by Mercury, for disturbing with her envy his passion for her
sister Herse.

The passage about Cain is one of the sublimest in Dante. Truly wonderful
and characteristic is the way in which he has made physical noise and
violence express the anguish of the wanderer's mind. We are not to
suppose, I conceive, that we see Cain. We know he has passed us, by his
thunderous and headlong words. Dante may well make him invisible, for
his words are things--veritable thunderbolts.

Cain comes in rapid successions of thunder-claps. The voice of Aglauros
is thunder-claps crashing into one another--broken thunder. This is
exceedingly fine also, and wonderful as a variation upon that awful
music; but Cain is the astonishment and the overwhelmingness. If it were
not, however, for the second thunder, we should not have had the two
silences; for I doubt whether they are not better even than one. At all
events, the final silence is tremendous.]

[Footnote 30: St. Luke ii. 48.]

[Footnote 31: The stoning of Stephen.]

[Footnote 32: These illustrative spectacles are not among the best
inventions of Dante. Their introduction is forced, and the instances not
always pointed. A murderess, too, of her son, changed into such a bird
as the nightingale, was not a happy association of ideas in Homer, where
Dante found it; and I am surprised he made use of it, intimate as
he must have been with the less inconsistent story of her namesake,
Philomela, in the _Metamorphoses_.]