r eyes and face, like those worn by the
monks of Cologne; but he finds that they are crushing weights of
gilded lead--splendid semblance and agonizing, destroying reality.
Again, when the two poets, Dante and Virgil, came to the Abyss of
Evil-pits (Malebolge), down which the crimson stream of Phlegethon
leaps in "a Niagara of blood," he is on the edge of the Circle of
Fraud in all its varieties, down which they are to be carried on the
back of Geryon, the triple-bodied serpent-monster, who is the type of
all human and demonic falsity. And how is that monster to be evoked
from the depth? Dante is bidden to take off the cord which girds
him--the cord with which he had endeavored in old days to bind the
spotted panther of sensual temptation--and to fling it into the void
profound. He does so, and the monster, type of the brutal and the
human in our nature when both are false, comes swimming and circling
up from below. "The outward form"--symbolized by the cord--"when
associated with unreality, only attracts the worst symbol of
unreality." Once more, ere he begins to climb the steep terraces of
the hill of Purgatory and true repentance, he has to be girt with a
far different cord, even with a humble rush, the only plant
which--because it bows to the billows and the wind--will grow among
the beating waves of the sea which surrounds the mountain of
Purgatory. That cord of rush is the type, not of outward profession,
but of humble sincerity.

Dante, in his characteristic way, does not pause to explain any of
these symbols to us. He leaves them to our own thought, but they all
point to the one great lesson that God needs not the service of
externalism, but the preparation of the heart.

In 1292, probably at the wish of his friends, Dante married Gemma
Donati. She bore him seven children in seven years, and there is
nothing to show that she was not a true and faithful wife to him,
though it is quite probable, from his absolute silence respecting her,
that the deepest grounds of sympathy hardly existed between them.

About the time of his marriage he plunged more earnestly into
politics, and became one of the Priori of Florence. He felt himself
that a change for the worse had passed over his life. It was no longer
so pure, so simple, so devout as it once had been. In the year 1300,
the year of the Great Jubilee which had been preached by Pope Boniface
VIII., he was in the mid-path of life, and was lost, as he
allegorically de