the narrow way lay right up the hill, and the name of the going up the side of the hill is called Difficulty. . . . They went then till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which mountains belong to the Lord of that hill of which we have spoken before."
14. Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress:—"But now in this valley of Humiliation poor Christian was hard put to it; for he had gone but a little way before he spied a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back or stand his ground. . . . Now at the end of this valley was another, called the valley of the Shadow of Death; and Christian must needs go through it, because the way to the Celestial City lay through the midst of it."
17. The sun, with all its symbolical meanings. This is the morning of Good Friday.
In the Ptolemaic system the sun was one of the planets.
20. The deep mountain tarn of his heart, dark with its own depth, and the shadows hanging over it.
27. Jeremiah ii. 6: "That led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through, and where no man dwelt."
In his note upon this passage Mr. Wright quotes Spenser's lines. Faerie Queene, I. v. 31,—
"there creature never passed
That back returned without heavenly grace."
30. Climbing the hillside slowly, so that he rests longest on the foot that is lowest.
31. Jeremiah v. 6: "Wherefore a lion out of the forest shall slay them, a wolf of the evenings shall spoil them, a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces."
32. Worldly Pleasure; and politically Florence, with its factions of Bianchi and Neri.
36. Più volte volto. Dante delights in a play upon words as much as Shakespeare.
38. The stars of Aries. Some philosophers and fathers think the world was created in Spring.
45. Ambition; and politically the royal house of France.
48. Some editions read temesse, others tremesse.
49. Avarice; and politically the Court of Rome, or temporal power of the Popes.
60. Dante as a Ghibelline and Imperialist is in opposition to the Guelfs, Pope Boniface VIII., and the King of France, Philip the Fair, and is banished from Florence, out of the sunshine, and into "the dry wind that blows from dolorous poverty."
Cato speaks of the "silent moon" in De Re Rustica, XXIX., Evehito luna silenti; and XL., Vites inseri luna silenti. Also Pliny, XVI. 39, has Silens luna; and Milton, in Samson Agonistes, "Silent as the moon."
