“Quick! quick! so that the time may not be lost By little love!” forthwith the others cried, “For ardour in well-doing freshens grace!” “O folk, in whom an eager fervour now Supplies perhaps delay and negligence, Put by you in well-doing, through lukewarmness, This one who lives, and truly I lie not, Would fain go up, if but the sun relight us; So tell us where the passage nearest is.” These were the words of him who was my Guide; And some one of those spirits said: “Come on Behind us, and the opening shalt thou find; So full of longing are we to move onward, That stay we cannot; therefore pardon us, If thou for churlishness our justice take. I was San Zeno’s Abbot at Verona, Under the empire of good Barbarossa, Of whom still sorrowing Milan holds discourse; And he has one foot in the grave already, Who shall erelong lament that monastery, And sorry be of having there had power, Because his son, in his whole body sick, And worse in mind, and who was evil-born, He put into the place of its true pastor.” If more he said, or silent was, I know not, He had already passed so far beyond us; But this I heard, and to retain it pleased me. And he who was in every need my succour Said: “Turn thee hitherward; see two of them Come fastening upon slothfulness their teeth.” In rear of all they shouted: “Sooner were The people dead to whom the sea was opened, Than their inheritors the Jordan saw; And those who the fatigue did not endure Unto the issue, with Anchises’ son, Themselves to life withouten glory offered.” Then when from us so separated were Those shades, that they no longer could be seen, Within me a new thought did entrance find, Whence others many and diverse were born; And so I lapsed from one into another, That in a reverie mine eyes I closed, And meditation into dream transmuted. Purgatorio: Canto XIX It was the hour when the diurnal heat No more can warm the coldness of the moon, Vanquished by earth, or peradventure Saturn, When geomancers their Fortuna Major See in the orient before the dawn Rise by a path that long remains not dim, There came to me in dreams a stammering woman, Squint in her eyes, and in her feet distorted, With hands dissevered and of sallow hue. I looked at her; and as the sun restores The frigid members which the night benumbs, Even thus my gaze did render voluble Her tongue, and made her all erect thereafter In little while, and the lost countenance As love desires it so in her did colour. When in this wise she had her speech unloosed, She ’gan to sing so, that with difficulty Could I have turned my thoughts away from her. “I am,” she sang, “I am the Siren sweet Who mariners amid the main unman, So full am I of pleasantness to hear.