Had I a rhyme so rugged, rough, and hoarse As would become the sorrowful abyss, O'er which the rocky circles wind their course, Then with a more appropriate form I might Endow my vast conceptions; wanting this, Not without fear I bring myself to write. For no light enterprise it is, I deem, To represent the lowest depth of all; Nor should a childish tongue attempt the theme.--WRIGHT.] Feeling the difference between sins, in their elements and, as far as we see them, their baseness, he treats them variously. His ridicule is apportioned with a purpose. He passes on from the doom of the sins of incontinence--the storm, the frost and hail, the crushing weights--from the flaming minarets of the city of Dis, of the Furies and Proserpine, "Donna dell'eterno pianto," where the unbelievers lie, each in his burning tomb--from the river of boiling blood--the wood with the Harpies--the waste of barren sand with fiery snow, where the violent are punished--to the Malebolge, the manifold circles of Falsehood. And here scorn and ridicule in various degrees, according to the vileness of the fraud, begin to predominate, till they culminate in that grim comedy, with its _dramatis personæ_ and battle of devils, Draghignazzo, and Graffiacane, and Malacoda, where the peculators and sellers of justice are fished up by the demons from the boiling pitch, but even there overreach and cheat their tormentors, and make them turn their fangs on each other. The diversified forms of falsehood seem to tempt the poet's imagination to cope with its changefulness and inventions, as well as its audacity. The transformations of the wildest dream do not daunt him. His power over language is nowhere more forcibly displayed than in those cantos, which describe the punishments of theft--men passing gradually into serpents, and serpents into men: Due e nessun l'imagine perversa Parea.--_Inf._ 25. And when the traitor, who murdered his own kinsman, was still alive, and seemed safe from the infamy which it was the poet's rule to bestow only on the dead, Dante found a way to inflict his vengeance without an anachronism:--Branca D'Oria's body, though on earth, is only animated by a fiend, and his spirit has long since fled to the icy prison.[118] [Footnote 118: