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, 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, 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. 100 105 110 His family, that had straight forward moved With feet upon his footprints, are turned round Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares Our volume through, would still some page "T will not be from Casal nor Acquasparta, 115 120 discover From whence come such unto the written word 125 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 II CANTO XIII. LET him imagine, who would well conceive What now I saw, and let him while I speak 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, Like unto that which Minos' daughter made, And one to have its rays within the other, And both to whirl themselves in such a manner 10 5 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, But in the divine nature Persons three, And in one person the divine and human. Then broke the silence of those saints concordant Of God's own mendicant was told to me, Into that bosom, thou believest, whence Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek 20 25 30 365 40 |