Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,
  For the first love made manifest in him
  Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.

Silent and wakeful many a time was he
  Discovered by his nurse upon the ground,
  As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'

O thou his father, Felix verily!
  O thou his mother, verily Joanna,
  If this, interpreted, means as is said!

Not for the world which people toil for now
  In following Ostiense and Taddeo,
  But through his longing after the true manna,

He in short time became so great a teacher,
  That he began to go about the vineyard,
  Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;

And of the See, (that once was more benignant
  Unto the righteous poor, not through itself,
  But him who sits there and degenerates,)

Not to dispense or two or three for six,
  Not any fortune of first vacancy,
  'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'

He asked for, but against the errant world
  Permission to do battle for the seed,
  Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.

Then with the doctrine and the will together,
  With office apostolical he moved,
  Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;

And in among the shoots heretical
  His impetus with greater fury smote,
  Wherever the resistance was the greatest.

Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,
  Whereby the garden catholic is watered,
  So that more living its plantations stand.

If such the one wheel of the Biga was,
  In which the Holy Church itself defended
  And in the field its civic battle won,

Truly full manifest should be to thee
  The excellence of the other, unto whom
  Thomas so courteous was before my coming.

But still the orbit, which the highest part
  Of its circumference made, is derelict,
  So that the mould is where was once the crust.

His family, that had straight forward moved
  With feet upon his footprints, are turned round
  So that they set the point upon the heel.

And soon aware they will be of the harvest
  Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares
  Complain the granary is taken from them.

Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf
  Our volume through, would still some page discover
  Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'

'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,
  From whence come such unto the written word
  That one avoids it, and the other narrows.

Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life
  Am I, who always in great offices
  Postponed considerations sinister.

Here are Illuminato and Agostino,
  Who of the first barefooted beggars were
  That with the cord the friends of God became.

Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,
  And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,
  Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;

Nathan the seer, and metropolitan
  Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus
  Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;

Here is Rabanus, and beside me here
  Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim,
  He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.

To celebrate so great a paladin
  Have moved me the impassioned courtesy
  And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,

And with me they have moved this company."