Not to dispense or two or three for six, Not fortune of first vacancy, any Non decimas quæ sunt pauperum Dei, He asked for, but against the errant world Permission to do battle for the seed, 95 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, Whereby the garden catholic is watered, 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. 100 105 110 His family, that had straight forward moved With feet upon his footprints, are turned round Yet say y I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf 115 120 Our volume through, would still some page discover "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 cord the friends of God became. Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here, And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain, 130 Who down below in volumes twelve is shining; 135 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 And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas, And with me they have moved this company." 140 145 CANTO XIII. ET him imagine, who would well conceive LE 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 That it transcends all clusters of the air; Let him the Wain imagine unto which Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day, Let him the mouth imagine of the horn That in the point beginneth of the axis 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 5 10 15 And he will have some shadowing forth of that That circled round the point at which I was; As swifter than the motion of the Chiana There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo, And in one person the divine and human, Then broke the silence of those saints concordant Into that bosom, thou believest, whence Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek And into that which, by the lance transfixed, 20 25 30 35 40 |