When Dante awoke, the beams of the dawn were visible; and they now produced a happiness like that of the traveller, who every time he awakes knows himself to be nearer home.  Virgil and Statius were already up; and all three, resuming their way to the mountain’s top, stood upon it at last, and gazed round about them on the skirts of the terrestrial Paradise.  The sun was sparkling bright over a green land, full of trees and flowers.  Virgil then announced to Dante, that here his guidance terminated, and that the creature of flesh and blood was at length to be master of his own movements, to rest or to wander as he pleased, the tried and purified lord over himself.

The Florentine, eager to taste his new liberty, left his companions awhile, and strolled away through the celestial forest, whose thick and lively verdure gave coolness to the senses in the midst of the brightest sun.  A fragrance came from every part of the soil; a sweet unintermitting air streamed against the walker’s face; and as the full-hearted birds, warbling on all sides, welcomed the morning’s radiance into the trees, the trees themselves joined in the concert with a swelling breath, like that which rises among the pines of Chiassi, when Eolus lets loose the south-wind, and the gathering melody comes rolling through the forest from bough to bough.[53]

Dante had proceeded far enough to lose sight of the point at which he entered, when he found himself on the bank of a rivulet, compared with whose crystal purity the limpidest waters on earth were clouded.  And yet it flowed under a perpetual depth of shade, which no beam either of sun or moon penetrated.  Nevertheless the darkness was coloured with endless diversities of May-blossoms; and the poet was standing in admiration, looking up at it along its course, when he beheld something that took away every other thought; to wit, a lady, all alone, on the other side of the water, singing and culling flowers.

“Ah, lady!” said the poet, “who, to judge by the cordial beauty in thy looks, hast a heart overflowing with love, be pleased to draw thee nearer to the stream, that I may understand the words thou singest.  Thou remindest me of Proserpine, of the place she was straying in, and of what sort of creature she looked, when her mother lost her, and she herself lost the spring-time on earth.”

As a lady turns in the dance when it goes smoothest, moving round with lovely self-possession, and scarcely seeming to put one foot before the other, so turned the lady towards the water over the yellow and vermilion flowers, dropping her eyes gently as she came, and singing so that Dante could hear her.  Then when she arrived at the water, she stopped, and raised her eyes towards him, and smiled, shewing him the flowers in her hands, and shifting them with her fingers into a display of all their beauties.  Never were such eyes beheld, not even when Venus herself was in love.  The stream was a little stream; yet Dante felt it as great an intervention between them, as if it had been Leander’s Hellespont.