Divine Comedy, Longfellow’s Translation

Halfway through the journey of his life, Dante finds the straight road gone—and a dark forest closing around him. A panther blocks the mountain path; then a lion and a ravenous she-wolf drive him back.

In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s fourteenth-century poem, a wilderness becomes the threshold to an immense moral cosmos. When Dante cries out, the shade of the Roman poet Virgil appears and offers to guide him by another road: through the realms of the dead, where every soul bears the weight of its choices. But Dante doubts his courage and his worthiness, while the path ahead promises terrors—and truths—he can scarcely imagine. Will Virgil’s guidance be enough to lead him out of the dark?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.