or pride he may be
eternally punished. Perhaps it was because Dante recognized the pride of
his learning, of his ancestry, of his associations with distinguished
personages as his besetting sin that he exercised his skill as a master
in showing us profound imagery representing the characteristics of
pride. Carved out of the mountain in the first circle of a terrace of
Purgatory are scenes illustrative of humility. While looking on these
scenes, which seem to live and speak in their beautiful and compelling
reality, the poet turns and sees approaching the forms of the proud. On
earth they had exalted themselves as if they had the weight of the world
on their shoulders, so now they are seen bent under huge burdens of
stone, crumpled up in postures of agonizing discomfort. The poet, to let
us know that he shares in their punishment, says:

"With equal pace as oxen in the yoke,
I, with that laden spirit, journey'd on
Long as the mild instructor suffer'd me."
(Purg. XII, 1)

He apostrophizes them, but the words are really an upbraiding of himself
for pride.

"O ye proud Christians, wretched weary ones,
Who in the vision of the mind infirm,
Confidence have in your backsliding steps,
Do ye not comprehend that we are worms
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly
That flieth unto judgment without screen?
Who floats aloft your spirit high in air?
Like are ye unto insects undeveloped
Even as the worm in whom formation fails!
As to sustain a ceiling or a roof
In place of corbel, sometimes a figure
Is seen to join unto its knees its breast
Which makes of the unreal, real anguish
Arise in him who sees it: fashioned thus
Beheld I these, when I had ta'en good heed
True is it, they were more or less bent down
According as they were more or less laden
And he who had most patience on his looks
Weeping did seem to say I can no more."
(Purg. X, 121)

Like all great men of undoubted sincerity Dante was intellectually big
enough to change his mind when a new view presented itself in
condemnation of an earlier judgment. So his "Vernacular Composition"
retracts a statement he had made in the New Life where he had held that
as amatory poems were addressed to ladies ignorant of Latin, Love should
be the only subject the poet ought to present in the vernacular. He
learned later and published his new view that there is good precedent
for treating in the vulgar tongue not