upper hand, and he
was finally driven from the city in exile.

Another sorrow had befallen him. Beatrice, whom he still continued to
love ardently (although he had married a good woman named Gemma Donati
and had three children) had died some years before, leaving him nothing
but her memory. But Dante's love for Beatrice had not interfered in his
relations with his wife. It was not an earthly love. He had not wanted
Beatrice as his wife, but rather as an ideal that he could worship. And
after her death he became both gloomy and unhappy.

His exile, moreover, was a bitter blow to Dante, for he had loved
Florence dearly and could not imagine making his home elsewhere. With
bitterness in his heart he wandered from city to city, and then he set
out in earnest to write the great poem which is called the _Divine
Comedy_. Dante had already written a number of beautiful poems, but
they were more in the style of other Italian and Latin poetry. What he
now planned was entirely new and so daring that it had never been
thought of since the beginning of the world.

He planned in this poem to describe a journey into the nethermost
regions of Hell, then into Purgatory and finally into Heaven, where
Beatrice should be his guide and conduct him to the throne of God
Himself.

Such a poem, as we have said, had never been written or even wildly
imagined, but Dante's imagination was so vivid that it seemed as if he
really had beheld the scenes that he described. And he told the story
of the poem as though the adventures in it were real and had happened
directly to himself.

Hell, according to Dante's belief, and that of the religion of his day,
was a gigantic funnel-shaped gulf directly beneath the city of
Jerusalem, shaped into nine vast circles or pits with a common center
that reached down to the center of the earth like a circular flight of
stairs. In the lowest pit of all Satan himself was to be found, ruling
his kingdom. On the other side of the earth was a wide sea, from which
arose a mighty mountain called the Mount of Purgatory--the place where
the souls of human beings did penance for their sins until they were
fit to enter Heaven. Heaven itself was composed of nine transparent and
revolving spheres that enclosed the earth, and in which were fastened
the sun, the moon and the stars. The motion of these heavenly bodies as
they rose and set above the earth's horizon was believed by Dante to be
due to the turning of the spheres,