Dante's "Inferno"

In the middle of the journey of our life <BR" found myself astray in a dark wood where the straight road had been lost sight of. How hard it is to say what it was like in the thick of thickets, in a wood so dense and gnarled the very thought of it renews my panic. It is bitter almost as death itself is bitter. But to rehearse the good it also brought me <BR" will speak about the other things I saw there. How I got into it I cannot clearly say for I was moving like a sleepwalker the moment I stepped out of the right way, But when I came to the bottom of a hill standing off at the far end of that valley where a great terror had disheartened me <P" looked up, and saw how its shoulders glowed already in the rays of the planet which leads and keeps men straight on every road. Then I sensed a quiet influence settling into those depths in me that had been rocked and pitifully troubled all night long And as a survivor gasping on the sand turns his head back to study in a