The ghost of what
each man was disappears through the trap-door of his state-room, and the
hell which the theatre faintly pictures behind the scenes begins in good
earnest.
For to what but to Dante's "Inferno" can we liken this steamboat-cabin,
with its double row of pits, and its dismal captives? What are these
sighs, groans, and despairing noises, but the _alti guai_ rehearsed by
the poet? Its fiends are the stewards who rouse us from our perpetual
torpor with offers of food and praises of shadowy banquets,--"Nice
mutton-chop, Sir? roast-turkey? plate of soup?" Cries of "No, no!"
resound, and the wretched turn again, and groan. The philanthropist has
lost the movement of the age,--keeled up in an upper berth, convulsively
embracing a blanket, what conservative more immovable than he? The great
man of the party refrains from his large theories, which, like the
circles made by the stone thrown into the water, begin somewhere and end
nowhere. As we have said, he expounds himself no more, the significant
fore-finger is down, the eye no longer imprisons yours. But if you ask
him how he does, he shakes himself, as if, like Farinata,--
"avesse l' inferno in gran dispetto,"--
"he had a very contemptible opinion of hell.
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