Seeing this prayer is graciously received, St.
Bernard bids Dante look up.

Thanks to his recently purified vision, our poet has a glimpse of the Triune Divinity,--compounded of love,--which so transcends all human expression that he declares "what he saw was not for words to speak." He concludes his grand poem, however, by assuring us that, although dazed by what he had seen, his "will roll'd onward, like a wheel In even motion, by the love impell'd, That moves the sun in heaven and all the stars." FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 16: All the quotations in Divine Comedy are taken from Cary's translation.] [Footnote 17: See the author's "Story of the Greeks."] [Footnote 18: See the author's "Story of the Chosen People," and "Story of the Romans."] [Footnote 19: See the author's "Legends of the Virgin and Christ."] THE ORLANDOS Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, hero of the Song of Roland and of an endless succession of metrical romances, was as popular a character in Italian literature as in the French.

The Italians felt a proprietary interest in Charlemagne because he had been crowned emperor of the West in Rome in the year 800, and also because he had taken the part of the pope against the Lombards.

Even the names of his twelve great peers were household words in Italy, so tales about Roland--who is known there as Orlando--were sure to find ready hearers.
The adventures of Roland, therefore, naturally became the theme of Italian epics, some of which are of considerable length and of great importance, owing principally to their exquisite versification and diction.

Pulci and Boiardo both undertook to depict Roland as a prey to the tender passion in epics entitled Orlando Innamorato, while Ariosto, the most accomplished and musical poet of the three, spent more than ten years of his life composing Orlando Furioso (1516), wherein he depicts this famous hero driven insane by his passion for an Oriental princess.
Assuming that his auditors are familiar with the characters of Boiardo's unfinished epic, Ariosto, picking up the thread of the narrative at the point where his predecessor dropped it, continues the story in the same vein.