• Of all the commentaries which I have consulted, that of Buti alone sustains this rendering of the line. The rest interpret it, “What I say is but a simple or feeble glimmer of what I saw.” ↩
• There are almost as many interpretations of this passage as there are commentators. The most intelligible is, that Dante forgot in a single moment more of the glory he had seen, than the world had forgotten in five and twenty centuries of the Argonautic expedition, when Neptune wondered at the shadow of the first ship that ever crossed the sea. ↩
• Aristotle, Ethics , I 1, Gillies’s Tr. :⁠— “Since every art and every kind of knowledge, as well as all the actions and all the deliberations of men, constantly aim at something which they call good, good in general may be justly defined, that which all desire.” ↩
• In the same manner the reflection of the Griffin in Beatrice’s eyes, Purgatorio XXXI 124, is described as changing, while the object itself remained unchanged:⁠— “Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled, When I beheld the thing itself stand still, And in its image it transformed itself.” ↩