• The evening of Good Friday. Dante, Convito , III 2, says:⁠— “Man is called by philosophers the divine animal.” Chaucer’s Assemble of Foules :⁠— “The daie gan failen, and the darke night That reveth bestes from hir businesse Berafte me my boke for lacke of light.” Mr. Ruskin, Modern Painters , III 240, speaking of Dante’s use of the word “bruno,” says:⁠— “In describing a simple twilight⁠—not a Hades twilight, but an ordinarily fair evening⁠—( Inferno II 1), he says, the ‘brown’ air took the animals away from their fatigues;⁠—the waves under Charon’s boat are ‘brown’ ( Inferno III 117); and Lethe, which is perfectly clear and yet dark, as with oblivion, is ‘bruna-bruna,’ ‘brown’ exceeding brown.’ Now, clearly in all these cases no warmth is meant to be mingled in the color. Dante had never seen one of our bog-streams, with its porter-colored foam; and there can be no doubt that, in calling Lethe brown, he means that it was dark slate-gray, inclining to black; as, for instance, our clear Cumberland lakes, which, looked straight down upon where they are deep, seem to be lakes of ink.