UPPER HELL.--Out of Limbo Dante and Virgil descend into the darkness of the second circle, where the carnal sinners are whirled round and round, “through the nether storm-eddying winds.” At its entrance snarls Minos, a type of the sinner’s disordered and terrified conception of Divine Justice. The Virgilian “Mourning Fields” of the martyrs of love are transformed into a region of active torment, and when, in a lull in the storm, Francesca da Rimini pours forth her piteous story in lines of ineffable pathos, the colouring becomes that of Arthurian romance (_Inf._ v.). Down again through the third circle of putrid rain and snow, where Cerberus (like the other hellish torturers, merely the effect of the sin, and the sinner’s own creation) tortures the gluttonous (_Inf._ vi.), and the fourth, where Plutus, demon god of wealth, guards the avaricious and prodigal butting at each other for all eternity, Dante is led to the dark waters of Styx, shortly after midnight, as Friday is passing into the early hours of Saturday (_Inf._ vii. 97-99). The marsh of Styx represents the fifth circle. Fixed in the slime below are souls, made visible only by the bubbles from their sighs: “Sullen were we in the sweet air, that is gladdened by the Sun, carrying heavy fumes within our hearts: now lie we sullen here in the black mire” (_Inf._ vii. 121-124). These souls are usually identified as the _accidiosi_, or slothful. The material element in Sloth is lack of charity; the formal element is sadness, the sadness which takes away the spiritual life and withdraws the mind from the Divine Good. Some commentators think that the slothful are placed in the Ante-Hell, and that these sad souls are those guilty of sullen or sulky anger, in contrast to the violent anger of those fiercer spirits who, naked and miry, are rending each other on the surface of the marsh, over which the poets are ferried by Phlegyas, the boatman of Dis, as Charon of Upper Hell. The Florentine, Filippo Argenti, who bandies bitter words with Dante during the passage, connects Anger with Pride (_Inf._ viii. 46) and with Bestiality (_ibid._ 62-63). As Anger leads to violence and fraud for the sake of vengeance, so Phlegyas conveys them to the entrance of the city of Dis, glowing red with eternal fire.