r terraces, where
are punished those who yielded to the sins of the body, Dante represents
himself as tempted by a Siren. She is described as ugly and repulsive
and then becoming, under the gaze of the beholder, fair and alluringly
attractive--a description, perhaps, unconsciously reproduced by Pope
when he wrote:

"Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen.
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."

Saved from the Siren by a noble lady (perhaps Lucia, Illuminating Grace)
and Virgil, the poet is brooding upon the dream which has brought to his
senses the pleasures of the world, when his guide admonishes him how
salvation from sin's seduction is to be had--viz., by using worldly
things as things to be trodden under foot, while the mind is raised to
Heaven, God's lure to draw it upward.

"Didst thou behold, that old enchantress
Who sole above us henceforth is lamented?
Didst thou behold how man is free from her?
Suffice it thee, and smite earth with thy heels,
Thine eyes lift upward to the lure, that whirls
The Eternal King with revolutions vast."
(XIX, 58.)

On the fifth terrace our poets find the shades of the avaricious and the
prodigals. They lie face to the ground, bound hand and foot, recalling
during the night instances of avarice and during the day proclaiming the
praise of liberality, as manifested in the Blessed Virgin, the pagan
Fabricius and St. Nicholas. The latter is identified in the United
States and some other countries, with the popular Santa Claus. Dante
says of St. Nicholas that "the spirit went on to speak of the bounty
which Nicholas gave to the maidens, to lead their youth to honor" (XX,
32). The allusion is to the legend that this Bishop of Myra secretly
threw at different times into the windows of the home of three destitute
maidens, bags of gold sufficient to provide them with dowries without
which they would have been forced by poverty to a life of shame. In the
realm of the avaricious and the prodigals, Dante addresses one of the
repentent souls: "Spirit, who thou wast and why ye have your backs
turned upward, tell me" (XX, 94).

The answer of the shade of Pope Adrian IV, who died thirty-nine days
after his election to the supreme pontificate without having been
crowned, is one of the fine passages of the poem.

"And he to me: 'Why Heaven makes us turn our backs to it, thou