The story that he went about the cities of North Italy during his exile, with countenance so gloomy and stare so fixed that men pointed to him and spoke of him as one who had visited Hell, and the other tradition, however well it may be founded, that the women sometimes pointed him out to their children and then used the memory of him as a bogy man to scare them into doing unpleasant things afterwards, would seem to indicate that he had occupied himself very little with the things around him, and that above all he had paid very little attention to the ways of childhood. He has shown over and over again, especially in the Purgatorio, that the simplest and most natural actions of child-life had been engraved upon his heart for he uses them with supreme truth in his figures. He knows how "An infant seeks his mother's breast When fear or anguish vex his troubled heart,"-- but he knows too, how the child who has done wrong, confesses its faults. "As little children, dumb with shame's keen smart. Will listening stand with eyes upon the ground. Owning their faults with penitential heart, So then stood I." There is a passage in the Inferno in which he describes so vividly the rescue of a child from the flames by its mother that Plumptre has even ventured to suggest that Dante himself may have been the actual subject of the rescue. Because it helps to an appreciation of Dante's intensity of expression and poignancy of vision the passage itself, with Plumptre's comment, seems deserving of quotation: "Then suddenly my Guide his arms did fling Around me, as a mother, roused by cries, Sees the fierce flames around her gathering And takes her boy, nor ever halts but flies. Caring for him than for herself far more, Though one scant shift her only robe supplies." {314} It must not be thought, however, that Dante's quality as an observer was limited to the actions of human beings. His capacity to see many other things is amply manifested in his great poem. Even the smallest of living things, that would surely be thought beneath his notice, became the subject of similies that show how much everything in nature interested the spirit of genius. The passage with regard to the ants has often been quoted, and is indeed a surprising manifestation of nature study at an unexpected time and from an entirely unanticipated quarter. Dante saw the souls of those who were so soon to enter into the realm of blessedness, and who were already in the last circle of purgatory, greeting each other with the kiss of peace and his picturesque simile for it is:-- "So oft, within their dusk brown host, proceed This ant and that, till muzzle muzzle meet; Spying their way, or how affairs succeed."