Chapter 7 first quarter

The first agenda for the meeting of the Dante Club was a proof of Longfellow's comments, revised from the previous discussion. "Very well, my dear Longfellow," said Dr. Holmes.He was content when only one of his corrections was accepted, and now Longfellow's finished draft contained two of the corrections he had made the previous Wednesday, and he was almost dancing.Complacent, Holmes began to concentrate on studying the psalms to be discussed tonight.He had prepared carefully for this, because tonight he was going to convince them that he was already defending Dante step by step.

"In the seventh circle of hell," said Longfellow, "Dante tells us that he and Virgil stumbled into a dark wood." On each circle of hell, Dante followed his admired guide, Ancient Roman poet Virgil.Along the way, he gradually learned about the fate of each group of sinners, and would choose one or two of them to criticize the current situation. "Anyone who has read The Divine Comedy has dreamed of this jagged and dense wood," Lowell said, "and Dante described it like a Rembrandt: a brush dipped in black paint, painted with a touch of hell. fire as light."

Longfellow began to read the translation.His voice sounded deep and real, soothing as a stream running under the snow.The "song" is that Dante came to the forest of suicides, the sinful "souls" became trees, and black blood flowed from the broken branches.Here the cruel harpies nest, with their broad wings, women's necks and faces, clawed feet, and feathered bellies.They peck and tear every tree.Although the tearing caused the tree great pain, these ghosts also got the only chance to vent their pain, and told Dante about their experience. "Their blood and words came together," Longfellow said.

Longfellow's black servant Peter knocked on the door and came in, muttering hesitantly into Lowell's ear, not knowing what he was talking about. "Someone wants to see me?" Lowell asked back, interrupting Holmes, "Who asked me to come here?" Peter stammered and became more and more confused, and Lowell yelled impatiently. Get up, the voice is so loud that everyone in the room can hear it. "Our club has a meeting tonight, who is here?" Peter pressed close to Lowell's ear and said, "Lowellson...Senson, that man said he was a policeman, sir."

In the vestibule, Police Officer Nicholas Ray stomped snow off his boots before pausing to look at Longfellow's large collection of statues and portraits of George Washington. Two men entered, and Ray stood up.Lowell first stopped and stared with his mouth open for a moment, then strode forward.He laughed, looking prescient. "Don't you know, Longfellow, that I've read all about this lad in the Freedmen's papers! He's a fighting hero of the Fifty-Fourth. It's a pleasure to meet you, my friend!" "It's the Fifty-Five, Professor Lowell," said Ray. "Professor Longfellow, I apologize for disturbing you."

"We've just done the most important thing, Sergeant," said Longfellow, smiling. "Don't be sorry." Ray turned to Lowell and said, "I was directed to come here by a kind young lady at your house. She said that was the only way to find you on Wednesday night." "Aha, it must be my Mabel!" Lowell laughed, "She didn't make things difficult for you, did she?" Ray smiled and said, "This young lady is very pleasant, sir. I've been to college lecture halls to see you before." Lowell seemed taken aback by this. "What?" He muttered to himself, his expression changed drastically, his face was red and his neck was thick, and his voice was hoarse and sarcasm, "They sent a police officer! Why do they do this? These puppets are completely manipulated by the city hall. No mind of their own! What business have you to me, sir?"

Longfellow reached out and grabbed Lowell's sleeve, "You know, the police officer, Professor Lowell, and a few of our colleagues are helping me translate a literary work that is temporarily unsuitable for the school out of good intentions. But this That's why..." "I'm very sorry," said the sergeant, his eyes wandering to Lowell, who saw the flush come and go quickly and disappear in an instant, "I visited university lecture halls, and besides I There's no other way. You know, I'm looking for a language specialist, and a few students told me your name."

"That's right, officer, I apologize," Lowell said, "but you were lucky to find me. I speak six languages, as fluently as a native speaks the Cambridge dialect." The great poet Smiling, he spread out the paper that Ray handed him on Longfellow's mahogany tabletop, pointed at the crooked and scribbled words with his fingers, and carefully deciphered them. Ray saw that Lowell's brows were frowning tightly, and wrinkles were piled up on his full forehead, so he said, "This is what a gentleman said to me. His voice was very low and sudden at that time, and he couldn't hear him at all. To say something. I can only conclude that he speaks some foreign language that is foreign to me."

"When?" Lowell asked. "A few weeks ago. It was a strange encounter." Ray closed his eyes, remembering the Whisperer clutching him from behind.Those words echoed clearly in his ears, but he just couldn't repeat them. "I'm afraid what I have written is only a rough transcription, Professor." "That's a tough nut to crack!" said Lowell, handing the paper to Longfellow. "I'm afraid you can't read anything from these hieroglyphs. You can't ask this man." Want to say something? At least find out what language he wants to speak."

Ray hesitated whether to answer or not. Longfellow said, "Sergeant, we have a few scholars who have been left empty-handed, and perhaps bribing them with oysters and macaroni will brighten their wits. Would you like us to make a copy?" "I am very grateful for that, Mr. Longfellow," Ray said.He looked at the faces of the two poets and added: "I have to ask you not to mention my visit today to anyone but you. This is a sensitive case." Lowell raised his eyebrows suspiciously. "Of course." Longfellow nodded slightly, as if to say that Ray could absolutely trust Craigie House.

"'Because of the foresight, if I were forced to leave the place I love, I...'" A student fumbled a line of Italian with his finger, frustratingly. Dante seminars were held twice a week on times chosen by Lowell—sometimes on Sundays. "Remember, Meade," Lowell said, and the student named Meade broke off, looking frustrated. "Remember, in the fifth heaven of heaven, that is, the Martian sky, Kajiaguida predicted to Dante that shortly after the poet returned to the world, he would be expelled from Florence. Burned at the stake. Meade, as I said, now you translate the next sentence." "'I shall not be lost elsewhere for my poetry.'" "Cut it off, Mead! Carmi means poetry—not just the lines, but the melody of the poem. In the days of the bards, you had to pay the poet to choose whether he would sing the story or Dante's Divine Comedy is a sermon to be sung, a song to be preached. 'So I should not be lost elsewhere for my poetry.' Well read, Mead." Finished, Lowell made a sort of stretching gesture, which indicated that he thought Meade's translation was okay. "Dante just repeats subconsciously." Pliny Meade said flatly.Edward Sheldon, the student sitting next to him, was embarrassed by his words. "As you say," continued Mead, "the Holy Prophet had foretold that Dante would find refuge in Gan Grande's shelter. So what else does Dante need 'elsewhere'? In essence, it's pure nonsense." Lowell said: "When Dante, with the force of his work, speaks of his new future home, when Dante speaks of other places he sought, he is not speaking of his life in the year of exile in 1302, but of It is his second life, and his life will be continued by his poetry for hundreds of years." Mead insisted: "But no one really took the 'beloved place' from Dante. He left it himself. Florence gave him the opportunity to return to his homeland and reunite with his wife and children, but he refused. Already!" In the eyes of teachers and classmates, Pliny Mead has never been an easy-going person, especially since he received his thesis grades last semester, he was so disappointed that he has been treating Lowell with hostile eyes.Mead attributed his low grades, and consequent drop in his class of 1867 from twelfth to fifteenth, to his repeated dissent from Lowell when discussing French literature, And this is something the professor cannot tolerate. "What kind of conditions are they offering!" Lowell laughed. "Only if Dante asks for a pardon and pays a large fine, they will let him go and restore his legal status in Florence! We force him to The return of the Confederate soldiers to the Union was far more glorious than that. It is a dream come true for a man who is so vocal about justice to come to such a despicable settlement with those who persecuted him." "Even so, Dante is a Florentine, no matter what we say!" asserted Meade, surreptitiously casting a glance at Sheldon for his support. "Don't you see that, Sheldon? Dante goes on and on about Florence, about the Florentines he saw and talked to in his travels in the afterlife, all while he was in exile! To me For me, my friends, it is clear that what he longed for was to return to Florence. The greatest failure of this man was that he died in exile, in poverty." Mead grinned complacently at keeping Lowell speechless, and Lowell stood up, slamming his hand into the pocket of his battered smoking shirt.Edward Sheldon couldn't help being furious, but from Lowell, from the smoke ring from Lowell's smoking pipe, Sheldon saw a higher spiritual realm.Lowell normally doesn't allow first-year students to come to advanced literature classes, but this boy Sheldon insisted on pleading so hard that he had to tell him that it depended on whether he could handle it.Sheldon is still grateful to Lowell for giving him this opportunity, and desperately wants to take this opportunity to defend Lowell and Dante and refute Meade.Sheldon was about to speak, but when Mead gave him a glare, he swallowed the words again. "Mead, Dante thinks about humanity as a whole, not about a single person." Lowell said gently, only with students he can be so patient, "Italians are always tugging on Dante's sleeve, trying to Forcing him to have the same political views and the same way of thinking as them. They did! To confine The Divine Comedy to Florence or Italy would take away all the compassion it contained." Sheldon mused, Meade, on the other hand, sat sternly, motionless. "What does the first line of the Divine Comedy say?" "'In the middle of my life,'" Edward Sheldon recited, with great excitement, "'I was lost in a dark wood.'" "'Our life.' From this line of the Divine Comedy, we are all on the journey of life, a pilgrimage like Dante's, and we must face our hell with determination, as Dante confronts his own hell. You see, the immortal value of this poem is that it is the autobiography of the human soul. Your soul, my soul, may be said to be identical with Dante's. " The next day, Lowell finished his lecture on Goethe and left the university lecture hall.A diminutive Italian in a taut, wrinkled dungaree jacket rushed past Lowell, startling him. "Bucky?" Lowell asked in surprise. Years earlier, Longfellow had hired Pietro Bacchi as an Italian teacher.The school board had been bitter about hiring a foreigner, especially an Italian Catholic, and Bucky had actually been expelled from the Vatican, but that hadn't changed their minds.By the time Lowell was in charge of the department, the Faculty Council happened to find a good-sounding reason to fire Pietro Bacchi: excessive drinking, high debts that he could not pay.On the day he was fired, the Italian complained to Professor Lowell, "I won't come here again, not until I die!" I don't doubt Bucky's words. "My dear professor." Bucky held the hand of the former dean, and shook it vigorously up and down as usual. "Oh." Lowell opened his mouth and said, wondering if he wanted to ask Bucky why he came to the Harvard compound while he was still a living person, didn't he say that he would never come here after he died. "I'm out for a walk, Professor," Bucky explained.Bucky said he was out for a walk, but his expression seemed anxious, no He kept looking behind Lowell, so Lowell exchanged a few words with him and left.Bucky's sudden appearance aroused his curiosity, so he stopped and turned around, and found that Bucky was walking towards a vaguely familiar person.It was the man in the black bowler hat and checkered waistcoat, the poet Lowell had seen lounging against an American elm a few weeks earlier.Strange, how did he get involved with Bucky?Lowell stood still, to see if Bucky would greet the man.But at this moment, a large group of students who had just finished the Greek recitation class swarmed over, blocking Lowell's sight, and when the crowd dispersed, the pair of weird guys disappeared.