Dante and the early astronomers . s which surround Beatrice and himselfto a double rainbow, and to two garlands of immortal 1 If the barbarians coming from some region That every day by Hoi ice is covered,Revolving with her son whom she delights Rome and all her noble works Were wonder-struck. .. Par. xxxi. 31-35. {Longfellow). 2 Those under the sway of the seven cold oxen. THE STARS. 299 roses. In the next canto he finds a new simile : inimagination he takes some of the biightest and mostfamiliar stars from our sky, and makes of them two newconstellations in the form of two crown
Dante and the early astronomers . s which surround Beatrice and himselfto a double rainbow, and to two garlands of immortal 1 If the barbarians coming from some region That every day by Hoi ice is covered,Revolving with her son whom she delights Rome and all her noble works Were wonder-struck. .. Par. xxxi. 31-35. {Longfellow). 2 Those under the sway of the seven cold oxen. THE STARS. 299 roses. In the next canto he finds a new simile : inimagination he takes some of the biightest and mostfamiliar stars from our sky, and makes of them two newconstellations in the form of two crowns. The stars arethese: fifteen from different parts of the sky, whichare so brilliant that they shine through air denseenough to quench lesser orbs; the Wain, which neversets in our sky; and the mouth of the horn whose tipis the axis on which the Primum Mobile is to say, as we have before remarked, Dantetakes the fifteen first-matrnitude stars and the starsinstanced by Alfraganus as of second magnitude. lPoIc Star. Fig. 42. Ursa Minor as a Horn. Par. xiii. 10. Ursa Minor is aptly compared to a horn, the widemouth of which is formed by its two bright stars Betaand Gamma,^ while the narrow end is Alpha, the PoleStar. These twenty-four bright stars we must thenimagine to group themselves into two constellationslike that into which Ariadne, the daughter of Minos,was changed when she died; this is Corona Borealis or _ ^ I do not know whether this comparison originated with Dante, butit was well known to Spanish sailors two centuries later. In the Arte ofNavigation which was EngHshed out of the Spanyshe, by RichardEden in 1561, Beta and Gamma of Ursa Minor are referred to as twostarres called the Guarrlians, or the mouth of the home. 300 THE STARS. the Northern Crown, otherwise called Ariadnes Crown,which suggests a circle, though it is not a perfect uses the word segni for any constellations, acustom we find in Ristoro also, although the modernusage is to res
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