No more wandering of the feet in labyrinth like this, and the eyes, once cruelly tearless, now blind with frozen tears. But the midmost hell, for hot-blooded sinners, has other sort of lakes,--as, for instance, you saw a little while ago, of hot pitch, in which one bathes otherwise than in Serchio--(the Serchio is the river at Lucca, and Pietrapana a Lucchese mountain). But observe,--for here we get to our main work again,--the great boiling lake on the Phlegethon of this upper hell country is red, not black; and its source, as well as that of the river which freezes beneath, is in this island of Crete! in the Mount Ida, "joyous once with leaves and streams." You must look to the passage yourselves--'Inferno,' XIV. (line 120 in Carey)--for I have not room for it now. The first sight of it, to Dante, is as "a little brook, whose crimsoned wave Yet lifts my hair with horror." Virgil makes him look at this spring as the notablest thing seen by him in hell, since he entered its gate; but the great lake of it is under a ruinous mountain, like the fallen Alp through which the Adige foams down to Verona;--and on the crest of this ruin lies couched the enemy of Theseus--the Minotaur: "And there, At point of the disparted ridge, lay stretched The infamy of Crete--at sight of us It gnawed itself, as one with rage distract. To him my guide exclaimed, 'Perchance thou deem'st The King of Athens here.'" Of whom and of his enemy, I have time to tell you no more to-day--except only that this Minotaur is the type or embodiment of the two essentially bestial sins of Anger and Lust;--that both these are in the human nature, interwoven inextricably with its chief virtue, Love, so that Dante makes this very ruin of the Rocks of hell, on which the Minotaur is couched, to be wrought on them at the instant when "the Universe was thrilled with love,"--(the last moment of the Crucifixion)--and that the labyrinth of these passions is one not fabulous, nor only pictured on coins of Crete. And the right interweaving of Anger with Love, in criminal justice, is the main question in earthly law, which the Athenian lawgiver had to deal with. Look, if you can, at my introductory Lectures at Oxford, p. 83; and so I must leave Theseus for this time;--in next letter, which will be chiefly on Christmas cheer, I must really try to get as far as his vegetable soup.