ay
We read no more.' While thus one spirit spake,
The other wail'd so sorely, that heart-struck
I through compassion fainting, seem'd not far
From death, and like a corse fell to the ground."

In the next circle where, with faces to the ground, the gluttons suffer
in a ceaseles storm, the shade of Ciacco, the Florentine, sits up as he
recognizes a fellow-citizen:

"He said to me: 'Thy City which is filled
With envy, like a sack that overflows,
Once held me in its tranquil life, well skilled
In dainties, and a glutton, and by those
Who dwelt there Ciacco called, but now the blows
Of this fierce rain avenge my wasteful sin.
Sad as I am, full many another knows
For a like crime like penalty within
This circle', and more word he spake not." (VI, 49.)

In the fourth circle the poet sees the souls of the prodigal and
avaricious rolling heavy stones, against each other with mutual
recriminations:

"Almighty Justice! in what store thou heap'st
New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld,
Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this?
E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising
Against encountered billow dashing breaks;
Such is the dance this wretched race must lead
Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found."
(VII, 19.)

The next is the circle of the wrathful and the sullen. Following is the
circle of the materialists and heretics, all covered with burning
sepulchres:

"Soon as I was within, I cast around
My eyes and saw extend on either hand
A spacious plain, that echoed to the sound
Of grief and torment sore; as o'er the land
At Aries where Rhone's vast waters stagnant stand
Or Pola, near Quarnero Bay, that bounds
And bathes the line of Italy, expand
Plains rough and heaving with supulchral mounds,
'Tis thus the plain, wherein I stood, with tombs abounds,
Save that the buried were more grimly treated.
For twixt the graves were scattered tongues of fire
By which to such a pitch the place was heated
That iron could no fiercer flame require
For art to mould it: lamentation dire
Issued from each unlidded vault, and seemed
The voice of those in torment."

From one of these fiery tombs, the Florentine freethinker, the haughty
Farinata, rises "with breast and brow erect, as holding Hell in great
contempt," and tells Dante that the souls of the lost have no knowledge
concerning things that are actually passing on earth, though they know