"If e'er the sacred song, which heaven arid earth Have lent a hand to frame,--which, many a year, Hath kept me lean with thought,--o'ercome the rage That bars re-entrance to the lovely fold, Where, like a lamb, I slept; the foe of wolves, Waging inveterate war against its life; With other voice, with other fleece, will I Return, a poet, and receive the laurel At that baptismal font, where I was brought Into the faith which makes souls dear to God."[15] In the same church here alluded to (San Giovanni), at Florence, there remained till lately a stone-remembrancer of Dante, in his prosperous days, scarcely less likely than "storied urn or animated bust," to awaken that sweet and voluntary sadness by which we love to associate dead things with the memory of those who once have lived. This was no other than an ancient bench of masonry which ran along the wall, "South of the church, east of the belfry-tower," on which, according to long-believed tradition, the future poet of the other world was wont to "Sit conversing in the sultry time," with those, "Who little thought that in his hand he held The balance, and assign'd, at his good pleasure, To each his place in the invisible world." ROGER's _Italy._ Here also, according to his own record, in rescuing a child which had fallen into the water, he accidentally broke one of the baptismal fonts,--a circumstance which seems to have been maliciously misrepresented as an act of wilful sacrilege. His stern anxiety to clear himself is characteristically indicated by the brief but dignified attestation of the real fact, in the last line of the following singular parallel between objects not otherwise likely to be brought into comparison with each other. Describing the wells in which; head-downward, simoniacal offenders (among the rest pope Nicholas III.) were tormented with flames, that glanced from heel to toe along the up-turned soles of their feet, he says,-- "The sides and bottom of that livid rock Were scoop'd into round holes, of equal size, Which seem'd not less nor larger than the fonts For baptism, in my beautiful St. John's; And one of which, not many years ago, I broke to save a drowning child from death: --Be this my seal to undeceive the world."[16] _Dell' Inferno_, canto XIX.