d kinsman of his wife
Gemma. Our poet was surprised to find him so soon after his death on
one of the terraces of Purgatory, the assumption being that because of
his delay of conversion to the end of his life Forese would be in
Outer Purgatory for a term equal in duration to the length of his life
on earth. But the reason he had come so quickly to Purgatory is to be
found in the efficacy of the prayers of his widow for the repose of
his soul.

"Then answered he: 'That now I wander reaping
The bitter sweat of all this punishment
My Nella gained for me, her vigil keeping
In prayer devout and infinite lament.
Thus, here, beyond that shore of waiting sent,
I landed, from the lower circles freed.
And that more dear to God omnipotent
Lives on my little widow, is the meed
Of the lone life she spends in many a saintly deed.'"
(XXXIII, 85.)

Before ascending to the seventh and last terrace Dante describes how
the angel of abstinence removed the sixth P.

"And as the harbinger of early dawn,
The air of May doth move and breathe out fragrance
Impregnate all with herbage and with flowers,
So did I feel a breeze strike in the midst
My front, and felt the moving of the plumes
That breathed around an odor of ambrosia;
And heard it said; Blessed are they whom grace
So much illumines that the love of taste
Excites not in their breasts too great desire,
Hungering at all times so far as is just."
(XXIV, 145.)

And now our penitent as he reaches the seventh terrace, where sins
against the virtue of purity are expiated, enters upon the last stage of
his purification. Here the spirits pass and repass through the midst of
intensely hot flames, proclaiming examples of chastity. It is worthy of
note that this terrace is the only place in Dante's Purgatory where fire
is the punitive agent--a conception of our poet all the more remarkable
because it runs counter to the view commonly held by the churchmen in
the West, including St. Augustine, St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas
Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, who teach that fire is the cleansing element
of all Purgatory. That indeed is only a theological opinion. The Church
itself, as the Greeks were assured at the Council of Florence, has never
put forth any dogmatic decree on the subject.

Bidden by the angel to enter the fire, Dante draws back paralysed with
fear. Scenes of burning at the stake come with horror to his mind. He
pro