of politics."
"Wendell! You can't mean that," said Lowell authoritatively.
"Lowell." Fields gazed pointedly at him.
"To think we became the hunters of slaves." Lowell backed away from Holmes only for a second. Lowell was a sixth or seventh cousin to the Healeys, as the Lowells were sixth or seventh cousins - at least - to all the best Brahmin families, and this only increased his resistance. "Would you ever have ruled as cowardly as Healey, Wendell? If I proposed that it had been your choice, would you have sent that Sims boy back to his plantation in chains? Tell me that. Just tell me that, Holmes."
"We must respect the family's loss," said Holmes quietly, directing his comment mainly at the half-deaf Mr. Greene, who nodded politely.
Longfellow excused himself when a bell sounded from upstairs. There could be professors or reverends, senators or kings among his guests, but at the signal, Longfellow would make his way to listen to the bedtime prayers of Alice, Edith, and Annie Allegra.
By the time he returned, Fields had deftly redirected the conversation toward lighter fare, so the poet walked into a round of laughter produced by an anecdote jointly retold by Holmes and Lowell. The host checked his Aaron Willard mahogany clock, an old timepiece he was partial to, not because of its looks or accuracy but because it seemed to tick more leisurely than others.
"Schooltime," he said softly.
The room fell hush. Longfellow closed the green shutters over the windows. Holmes turned down the flames of the moderator lamps while the others helped arrange a row of candles. This series of overlapping halos communed with the flickering glow of the fire. The five scholars and Trap - Longfellow's plump Scotch terrier - assumed their preordained posts along the circumference of the small room.
Longfellow gathered up a sheaf of papers from his drawer and passed out a few pages of Dante's Italian to each guest, along with a set of printed proof sheets with his corresponding line-by-line translation. In the delicately woven chiaroscuro of hearth, lamp, and wick, the ink seemed to lift off Longfellow's proofs, as if a page of Dante suddenly came alive under one's eyes. Dante had arranged his verse in a terza rima, every three lines a poetic set, the first and third rhyming and the middle projecting a rhyme with the first line of the next set, so that the verses leaned ahead in forward motion.
Holmes always relished how Longfellow opened their Dante meetings with a recitation of the first lines of the Commedia in unassumingly perfect Italian.
" 'Midway through the journey of our life, I found myself within a dark wood, for the right way had been lost.' "
Chapter 3
III
As the first order of business in a Dante Club meeting, the host reviewed the proof sheets from the previous week's session.
"Good work, my dear Longfellow," Dr. Holmes said. He was satisfied whenever one of his suggested amendments was approved, and two from last Wednesday had found their way into Longfellow's final proofs. Holmes turned his attention to this evening's cantos. He had taken extra care to prepare, because today he would have to persuade them he had come to protect Dante.
"In the seventh circle," Longfellow said, "Dante tells us how he and Virgil come upon a black forest." In each region of Hell, Dante followed his adored guide, the Roman poet Virgil. Along the way, he learned the fate of each group of sinners, singling out one or two to address the living world.
"The lost forest that has occupied the private nightmares of all of Dante's readers at one time or another," Lowell said. "Dante writes like Rembrandt, with a brush dipped in darkness and a gleam of hellfire as his light."
Lowell, as usual, would have every inch of Dante at his tongue's end; he lived Dante's poetry, body and mind. Holmes, for one of the only instances in his life, envied another person's talent.
Longfellow read from his translation. His reading voice rang deep and true, without any harshness, like the sound of water running under a fresh cover of snow. George Washington Greene seemed particularly lulled, for the scholar, in the spacious green armchair in the corner, drifted to sleep amid the soft intonations of the poet and the mild heat from the fire. The little terrier Trap, who had rolled onto his plump stomach under Greene's chair, also dozed off, and their snores arranged themselves in tandem, like the grumbling bass in a Beethoven symphony.
In the canto at hand,