[Illustration: Fig. 42. Ursa Minor as a Horn. _Par._ xiii. 10.] In one of the passages just quoted other constellations and stars are mentioned together with Ursa Major. In _Par._ xii. Dante has compared the two circles of spirits which surround Beatrice and himself to a double rainbow, and to two garlands of immortal roses. In the next canto he finds a new simile: in imagination he takes some of the brightest and most familiar stars from our sky, and makes of them two new constellations in the form of two crowns. The stars are these: fifteen from different parts of the sky, which are so brilliant that they shine through air dense enough to quench lesser orbs; the Wain, which never sets in our sky; and the mouth of the horn whose tip is the axis on which the Primum Mobile revolves. That is to say, as we have before remarked, Dante takes the fifteen first-magnitude stars and the stars instanced by Alfraganus as of second magnitude. Ursa Minor is aptly compared to a horn, the wide mouth of which is formed by its two bright stars Beta and Gamma,[304] while the narrow end is Alpha, the Pole Star. These twenty-four bright stars we must then imagine to group themselves into two constellations like that into which Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, was changed when she died; this is Corona Borealis or the Northern Crown, otherwise called Ariadne’s Crown, which suggests a circle, though it is not a perfect one. Dante uses the word “segni” for any constellations, a custom we find in Ristoro also, although the modern usage is to restrict “signs” to mean only divisions of the zodiac. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [304] I do not know whether this comparison originated with Dante, but it was well known to Spanish sailors two centuries later. In the _Arte of Navigation_ which was “Englished out of the Spanyshe,” by Richard Eden in 1561, Beta and Gamma of Ursa Minor are referred to as “two starres called the Guardians, or the mouth of the horne.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The star-like spirits, thus grouped into a surpassingly brilliant double constellation, begin to sing their ineffable heavenly song, and to circle round the centre where Dante stands, in a marvellous dance, whose swiftness, when compared with anything known on earth, is as the movement of that swift heaven which carries with it all the rest, when compared with the flowing of the sluggish river Chiana.[305] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [305] _Par._ xiii. 1-28. ------------------------------------------------------------------------