G. Villani says, that in 1300, the year of jubilee, for the consolation of Christian pilgrims, the Veronica was shown in St. Peter’s every Friday, and on other solemn festivals. viii. 36.]

“I called them pilgrims in the wide sense of that word; for pilgrims may be understood in two ways,—­one wide, and one narrow.  In the wide, whoever is out of his own country is so far a pilgrim; in the narrow use, by pilgrim is meant he only who goes to or returns from the house of St. James.[R] Moreover, it is to be known that those who travel in the service of the Most High are called by three distinct terms.  Those who go beyond the sea, whence often they bring back the palm, are called palmers.  Those who go to the house of Galicia are called pilgrims, because the burial-place of St. James was more distant from his country than that of any other of the Apostles.  And those are called romei who go to Rome, where these whom I call pilgrims were going.

[Footnote R:  The shrine of St. James, at Compostella, (contracted from Giacomo Apostolo,) in Galicia, was a great resort of pilgrims during the Middle Ages,—­and Santiago, the military patron of Spain, was one of the most popular saints of Christendom.  Chaucer says, the Wif of Bathe

    “Had passed many a straunge streem;
  At Rome sche hadde ben, and at Boloyne,
  In Galice at Seynt Jame, and at Coloyne.”

And Shakspeare, in All’s Well that Ends Well, makes Helena represent herself as “St. Jacques’s pilgrim.”]

  “O pilgrims, who in pensive mood move
      slow,
  Thinking perchance of those who absent
      are,
    Say, do ye come from land away so far
    As your appearance seems to us to show?

  “For ye weep not, the while ye forward go
    Along the middle of the mourning town,
    Seeming as persons who have nothing
      known
    Concerning the sad burden of her woe.

  “If, through your will to hear, your steps ye
      stay,
    Truly my sighing heart declares to me
    That ye shall afterwards depart in tears.

  “For she[S] her Beatrice hath lost:  and ye
    Shall know, the words that man of her
      may say
    Have power to make weep whoever
      hears.”

[Footnote S:  The city.]

Some time after this sonnet was written, two ladies sent to Dante, asking him for some of his rhymes.  That he might honor their request, he wrote a new sonnet and sent it to them with two that he had previously composed.  In his new sonnet, he told how his thought mounted to heaven, as a pilgrim, and beheld his lady in such condition of glory as could not be comprehended by his intellect; for our intellect, in regard to the souls of the blessed, is as weak as our eyes are to the sun.  But though he could not clearly see where his thought led him, at least he understood that his thought told of his lady in glory.