WINTER MEETING, 1877. 43 



But this is a subdned picture compared with Dante's description of the first 

 forest discovered in his j)ilgrini's progress, — for you will remember tliat Dante's 

 Inferno is a Pilgrim's Progress, 8oniething like Bunyan's, excepting that the 

 movement is in the o])p()site direction. When the pilgrims, Dante and Vir- 

 gil, had passed the dreadful river tSty.x and the three-headed dog, Cerberus, 

 and the infernal gates with the inscriptions, they — probably contrary to their 

 expectations — found 



" That thoy had put themselves within a wood 

 That was not marketl by any path whatever, 

 Not foliage green, but of a dusky color, 

 Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled. 

 Not apple trees were there, but thorns with poison; 

 There do hideous harpies make tlieir nests." 



These trees were lost souls; they had been suicides on earth, and had been 

 planted thus to undergo eternal i)unishment. Every trunk, and branch, and 

 leaf was a living member of what had been a human body. The harpies, un- 

 clean birds, otiensive beyond, description, and themselves immortal, came to 

 lodge in the branches and feed, upon them ; every brown leaf they plucked ex- 

 torted a cry of pain from the tree ; and from the brown branches brown blood 

 was dripping. Everything was brown ; tiie air was brown ; the waves under 

 Charon's boat were brown ; the waters of Lethe were brown — excecdiuij brown : 

 the inscription over the gates of Hades was brown ; and all the cliffs in sight 

 were brown. Lamentations were heard on all sides. The pilgrims thought 

 they proceeded from living creatures concealed in the trunks of the trees, and 

 they stood bewildered. 



"Therefore, the Master said, if thou break off 



Some little spraj^ from any of those trees, 



The thoughts thou hast will wholly be made vain. 



Then stretched 1 forth my hand a little forward 



And plucked a branchlet off from a great thorn; 



And the trunk cried: ' VVlij^ dost thou mangle me? 

 'Why dost tliou rend me? 

 'Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever? 

 * Men once we were, and now are changed to trees; 

 'Indeed, thy hand should be more pitiful 

 ' Even if souls of serpents we had been.' 



So from splinter issued forth together 



Both words and blood; whereat 1 let the tij) 



Fall aud stood like a man who is afraid." 



While trees such as these make terrible the eternal prisons below, as poets 

 have imagined them, so the poets also never fail to describe Paradise as 

 abounding in trees whose foliage is perennial and ever green. And not entirely 

 unlike the idea of Dante, who has bad souls translated as trees such as I have 

 referred to, is the idea of the sacred psalmist David, as to good souls, when 

 speaking, perhaps, of children and of their removal to the heavenly world after 

 life's fitful fever here, says: "They shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon, and 

 those that be planted in tiie house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of 

 our God." 



These celestial trees are ever green, and ever fruitful. A secular poet has 

 described some under enchantment that ''one day bloomed, and fruitful were 

 the next;" but these that flourish in the courts of our God stand upon either 

 side of a pure river of the water of life, and are trees of life bearing twelve 

 manner of fruit and yielding their fruit every month, and the leaves of these 



