English

CANTO XXV

When he had made an end, the thief exclaimed,
Raising his hands with both the figs on high:
" Take thou them, God; at thee, at thee they are aimed. "
Thenceforth the serpents were no enemy
To me; for round his neck, as if it hissed
Thou speak'st no more! one coiled and clung thereby.
Another about his arms began to twist
And tighten, prisoning him in front so fast,

CANTO XXIV

I N that part of the young year when the Sun
Beneath Aquarius warms his beaming locks
And toward the South the nights begin to run,
And when upon the ground the hoar-frost mocks
With likeness her white sister's effigy,
But soon are blurred that limner's pencilled strokes,
The peasant, who hath nothing now laid by,
Rises and looks and sees the fields and lanes

CANTO XXIII

Silent , lonely, and with no company,
One before and one after, as on their way
Journey the Minor Friars, journeyed we.
My thought, that lingered on the present fray,
Was turned to Aesop and his fable, where
The frog would the inveigled mouse betray.
For Yes and Yea make not a better pair
Than that with this case, if but with good heed

CANTO XXII

I HAVE seen horsemen moving camp to arm
For the assault, and mustering band by band,
And other whiles retiring at the alarm;
I have seen chargers stamp upon your land,
O Aretines, and foray sweep pell-mell,
The clash of tourneys, and the tilt-yard manned,
To trumpets now and now to beaten bell,
To drums and turret-beacons from afar,

CANTO XXI

From bridge to bridge we came, with other talk
Which to recite my Comedy hath no care,
Keeping the summit of the stony baulk.
Then stopt we, on Malebolge's following lair
To look, and other vain lamenting moil;
And marvellously dark I found it there.
As the Venetians in their arsenal boil
The lumps of pitch in winter, stiff as glue,

CANTO XX

New verses of new pangs must I compose
To fill the first book's twentieth canto and tell
Of the submerged spirits and their woes.
I was now stationed so that I could well
Look down into the new discovered deep
Bathed in the tears of anguish as they fell.
In the round valley I saw a people weep
As they came on, all silent, at the pace

CANTO XIX

O S IMON Magus , O lost wretches led,
By thee, who prostitute the things that need,
Being things of God, with goodness to be wed;
Who gape for gold and silver, mouths of greed!
For you now must the trumpet blow the doom,
For in the third chasm is your place decreed.
To the next hollow we had already come
And, mounted on the baulk, were in that part

CANTO XVIII

Hell hath a region, Malebolge called.
All stone and iron-coloured is the place,
Like the round barrier wherewith it is walled.
Right in the middle of the malignant space
There yawns a well exceeding deep and wide,
Whose structure hereinafter I shall trace.
The margin therefore that remains beside,
Between the well and the cliff's root, is round;

CANTO XVII

" Behold the fell beast with the sharp tail curled
That mountains, walls and armour pierces through!
Behold him who corrupteth the whole world! "
Thus did my Master speak to me anew,
And beckoned him that he should come ashore
Where to the stony causeway's end we drew.
And that obscene image of Fraud then bore
Onward, and landed with his head and chest,

CANTO XVI

Now was I in a place where the deep drum
Of water falling into the other ring
Was heard resounding like a bee-hive's hum,
When three shades parted, in their haste running
Together, from a troop that passed beside
Beneath the rain that scorched them with its sting.
Toward us they ran and each with one voice cried:
" Stop thou, who of our perverse city's brood