They pass the threshold. The soul's ill affection would disuse that gate, making the crooked seem the straighter path. Dante hears it close. Had his eyes turned, what plea might have availed? They mount the riven rock, winding alternate as a wave flies and advances. Here some little art behooves us, Virgil says: observe the varying flexure of the path. They go so slowly that the moon, with cleft orb, once more overhangs her watery couch before the strait is threaded. Free at last, they stand spent and uncertain on a plain more lonesome than desert roads. The cornice measures thrice a man's stature from brink to bank, equal left and right as far as the eye can wing.
The bank that denies ascent is marble white, wrought so exactly that Polycletus and even nature would have been shamed. The angel of the long-wept peace seems to have said Hail; Mary is imaged there, and in her act, as a figure sealed on wax, Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Fix not thy mind on one place only, Virgil says, near the heart. Behind her, the cart and kine draw the sacred ark; seven quires; incense the eye and smell dispute; David leaps in humble guise, less and yet more than kingly, while Michal looks scorn and sorrow from the lattice. Next, Trajan at the bridle, a widow in tears, eagles struggling with the wind. Grant vengeance, sire, my son is murdered. Wait now till I return. And if thou dost not return? Where I am, who then is, may right thee. What to thee is other's good if thou neglect thy own? It beseemeth well my duty be performed ere I move hence: so justice wills, and pity bids me stay. He whose ken surveys nothing new produced that visible speaking. Dante gazes fondly on those patterns of meek humbleness, more precious for their artist's sake.
Lo, Virgil whispers, a multitude, slack of pace. Reader, do not miss thy good purpose hearing how debts are cancelled; ponder not the form of suffering; think what succeeds; at worst it cannot pass the mighty doom. Dante's foil'd sight finds no human semblance. So curbed to earth beneath their heavy teems that Virgil's eye struggled too: look intently, disentangle what underneath those stones approaches. Christians and proud, poor and wretched, trusting unstaid perverseness: know ye not we are worms, yet made at last to form the winged insect imped with angel plumes? Why buoy ye up aloft your unfledged souls? They come like corbels under a floor, knees crumpled to the breast. Each more or less contract as the back is laden. And he who showed most patience in his look, wailing, can endure no more.
