Purgatorio

Many of these translations stand alongside Longfellow's most famous original poems -- "The Psalm of Life," "The Children's Hour" and "Hiawatha." Perhaps his most important were those based upon Dante, which he began in 1843. This second volume, The Purgatory -- with its visions of the Wanton, the Gluttonous, the Sodomites, the Tree of Knowledge and the River Lethe -- is second in the three-volume poem that begins with the Inferno. Smiling said she to me, "Recollect thee now That thou this very day hast drunk of Lethe . . ."