Quando leggemmo il disiato viso Esser baciato di cotanto amante, Questi, chi mai da me non sia diviso! La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante ... _Galeotto_ fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse ... Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante. In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight; and, instead of naming Paolo, which indeed she never has done from the beginning, she now designates him as Questi chi mai da me non sia diviso! Are we not impelled to join in her prayer, wishing them happier in their union? _Petrarca._ If there be no sin in it. _Boccaccio._ Ay, and even if there be ... God help us! What a sweet aspiration in each cesura of the verse! three love-sighs fixed and incorporate! Then, when she hath said La bocca mi bacio, tutto tremante, she stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for the sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says: '_Galeotto_ is the name of the book,' fancying by this timorous little flight she has drawn him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the eagle beak of Dante and his piercing eyes are yet over her. '_Galeotto_ is the name of the book.' 'What matters that?' 'And of the writer.' 'Or that either?' At last she disarms him: but how? '_That_ day we read no more.' Such a depth of intuitive judgment, such a delicacy of perception, exists not in any other work of human genius; and from an author who, on almost all occasions, in this part of the work, betrays a deplorable want of it. _Petrarca._ Perfection of poetry! The greater is my wonder at discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this whole section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of Francesca, And he who fell as a dead body falls,