Like all great works, the Inferno should be studied both in detail and as a whole in order to be rightly understood; and when we understand it, even partially, when we have been with Dante down through all the circles to that central lake of ice in which all humanity seems frozen out of the base traitors who showed no humanity on earth, when we have faced the icy breath of the eternal air winnowed by Satan's wings, and have been numbed to every thought and feeling except one--one which has been burned and frozen into our hearts through all those rounds of shame and woe--the thought of the pity, the misery, the hatefulness of sin; then, but then only, we shall be ready to understand the Purgatory, shall know something of what the last lines of the Inferno meant to Dante: 'We mounted up, he first and second I, until through a round opening I saw some of those beauteous things that Heaven bears; and thence we issued forth again to see the stars.'[53] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 31: Compare pp. 21-23.] [Footnote 32: Epistola xi. § 8.] [Footnote 33: _Inferno_, ii. 1-6.] [Footnote 34: _Inferno_, xxviii.] [Footnote 35: _Ibid._ xxiii. 58 sqq.] [Footnote 36: _Ibid._ xviii. 103-136.] [Footnote 37: _Inferno_, xx. 27, 28: 'Qui vive la pietà quand' è ben morta.' The double force of pietà, 'pi[e]ty,' is lost in the translation.] [Footnote 38: _Ibid._ xxiv. 112-xxv. 9 &c.] [Footnote 39: _Ibid._ xiv. 43-66.] [Footnote 40: _Inferno_, xviii. 82-96.] [Footnote 41: _Ibid._ x. 22-93.] [Footnote 42: _Ibid._ xiii. 55-78.] [Footnote 43: _Inferno_, xvi. 64-85.] [Footnote 44: _Inferno_, iii. 1-9.] [Footnote 45: _Inferno_, iv. 23-45, 84.] [Footnote 46: Compare e.g. _Purgatorio_, iii. 34-45, xxii. 67-73.] [Footnote 47: _Inferno_, v. 88, 91, 92.] [Footnote 48: _Inferno_, xxx. 64-67.] [Footnote 49: _Inferno_, vii. 117-126.] [Footnote 50: _Inferno_, xix.] [Footnote 51: _Inferno_, xxvii.] [Footnote 52: _Purgatorio_, v. 85-129.] [Footnote 53: _Inferno_, xxxiv. 136-139.] IV PURGATORY 'Leaving behind her that so cruel sea, the bark of poesy now spreads her sails to speed o'er happier waters; and I sing of that mid kingdom where the soul of man is freed from stain, till worthy to ascend to Heaven.'[54] Such are the opening words of Dante's Purgatory, and they drop like balm upon our seared and wounded hearts when we have escaped from the dread abode of eternal ill-desert.