Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 1

by Leigh Hunt

In the form, then, of a white rose the blessed multitude of human souls lay manifest before the eyes of the poet; and now he observed, that the winged portion of the blest, the angels, who fly up with their wings nearer to Him that fills them with love, came to and fro upon the rose like bees; now descending into its bosom, now streaming back to the source of their affection. Their faces were all fire, their wings golden, their garments whiter than snow. Whenever they descended on the flower, they went from fold to fold, fanning their loins, and communicating the peace and ardour which they gathered as they gave. Dante beheld all,—every flight and action of the whole winged multitude,—without let or shadow; for he stood in the region of light itself, and light has no obstacle where it is deservedly vouchsafed.

"Oh," cries the poet, "if the barbarians that came from the north stood dumb with amazement to behold the magnificence of Rome, thinking they saw unearthly greatness in the Lateran, what must I have thought, who had thus come from human to divine, from time to eternity, from the people of Florence to beings just and sane?"

Dante stood, without a wish either to speak or to hear. He felt like a pilgrim who has arrived within the place of his devotion, and who looks round about him, hoping some day to relate what he sees. He gazed upwards and downwards, and on every side round about, and saw movements graceful with every truth of innocence, and faces full of loving persuasion, rich in their own smiles and in the light of the smiles of others.

He turned to Beatrice, but she was gone;—gone, as a messenger from herself told him, to resume her seat in the blessed rose, which the messenger accordingly pointed out. She sat in the third circle from the top, as far from Dante as the bottom of the sea is from the region of thunder; and yet he saw her as plainly as if she had been close at hand. He addressed words to her of thanks for all she had done for him, and a hope for her assistance after death; and she looked down at him and smiled.

The messenger was St. Bernard. He bade the poet lift his eyes higher; and Dante beheld the Virgin Mary sitting above the rose, in the centre of an intense redness of light, like another dawn. Thousands of angels were hanging buoyant around her, each having its own distinct splendour and adornment, and all were singing, and expressing heavenly mirth; and she smiled on them with such loveliness, that joy was in the eyes of all the blessed.

At Mary's feet was sitting Eve, beautiful—she that opened the wound which Mary closed; and at the feet of Eve was Rachel, with Beatrice; and at the feet of Rachel was Sarah, and then Judith, then Rebecca, then Ruth, ancestress of him out of whose penitence came the song of the Miserere;[55] and so other Hebrew women, down all the gradations of the flower, dividing, by the line which they made, the Christians who lived before Christ from those who lived after; a line which, on the opposite side of the rose, was answered by a similar one of Founders of the Church, at the top of whom was John the Baptist. The rose also was divided horizontally by a step which projected beyond the others, and underneath which, known by the childishness of their looks and voices, were the souls of such as were too young to have attained Heaven by assistance of good works.

St. Bernard then directed his companion to look again at the Virgin, and gather from her countenance the power of beholding the face of Christ as God. Her aspect was flooded with gladness from the spirits around her; while the angel who had descended to her on earth now hailed her above with "Ave, Maria!" singing till the whole host of Heaven joined in the song. St. Bernard then prayed to her for help to his companion's eyesight. Beatrice, with others of the blest, was seen joining in the prayer, their hands stretched upwards; and the Virgin, after benignly looking on the petitioners, gazed upwards herself, shewing the way with her own eyes to the still greater vision. Dante then looked also, and beheld what he had no words to speak, or memory to endure.

He awoke as from a dream, retaining only a sense of sweetness that ever trickled to his heart.

Earnestly praying afterwards, however, that grace might be so far vouchsafed to a portion of his recollection, as to enable him to convey to his fellow-creatures one smallest glimpse of the glory of what he saw, his ardour was so emboldened by help of the very mystery at whose sight he must have perished had he faltered, that his eyes, unblasted, attained to a perception of the Sum of Infinitude. He beheld, concentrated in one spot—written in one volume of Love—all which is diffused, and can become the subject of thought and study throughout the universe—all substance and accident and mode—all so compounded that they become one light. He thought he beheld at one and the same time the oneness of this knot, and the universality of all which it implies; because, when it came to his recollection, his heart dilated, and in the course of one moment he felt ages of impatience to speak of it.

But thoughts as well as words failed him; and though ever afterwards he could no more cease to yearn towards it, than he could take defect for completion, or separate the idea of happiness from the wish to attain it, still the utmost he could say of what he remembered would fall as short of right speech as the sounds of an infant's tongue while it is murmuring over the nipple; for the more he had looked at that light, the more he found in it to amaze him, so that his brain toiled with the succession of the astonishments. He saw, in the deep but clear self-subsistence, three circles of three different colours of the same breadth, one of them reflecting one of the others as rainbow does rainbow, and the third consisting of a fire equally breathing from both.[56]