"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.
"Beyond the sphere that widest orbit hath
Passeth the sigh that issues from my
heart,
While weeping Love doth unto him impart
Intelligence which leads him on his path,
"When at the wished-for place his flight he
stays,
A lady he beholds, in honor dight,
And shining so, that, through her splendid
light,
The pilgrim spirit upon her doth gaze.
"He sees her such that his reporting words
I understand not, for he speaketh low
And strange to the sad heart which makes
him tell;
"He speaketh of that gentle one, I know,
Since oft he Beatrice's name records;
So, ladies dear, I understand him well."