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Not to dispense or two or three for six,

Not any fortune of first

fortune of first vacancy,

Non decimas quæ sunt pauperum Dei,

He asked for, but against the errant world

Permission to do battle for the seed,

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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, Wherever the resistance was the greatest. Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,

Whereby the garden catholic is watered, So that more living its plantations stand. 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.

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His family, that had straight forward moved

With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
So that they set the point upon the heel.
And soon aware they will be of the harvest

Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
Complain the granary is taken from them.
Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf

Our volume through, would still some page
Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'

"T will not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,

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discover

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,

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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."

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II

CANTO XIII.

LET him imagine, who would well conceive

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
The sky enliven with a light so great

That it transcends all clusters of the air;

Let him the Wain imagine unto which

Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day,
So that in turning of its pole it fails not;

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
That one should forward go, the other backward;

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And he will have some shadowing forth of that
True constellation and the double dance

That circled round the point at which I was;
Because it is as much beyond our wont,

As swifter than the motion of the Chiana
Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,

But in the divine nature Persons three,

And in one person the divine and human.
The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure,
And unto us those holy lights gave heed,
Growing in happiness from care to care.

Then broke the silence of those saints concordant
The light in which the admirable life

Of God's own mendicant was told to me,
And said: "Now that one straw is trodden out
Now that its seed is garnered up already,
Sweet love invites me to thresh out the other:

Into that bosom, thou believest, whence

Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek
Whose taste to all the world is costing dear,
And into that which, by the lance transfixed,
Before and since, such satisfaction made
That it weighs down the balance of all sin,

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