But the most wonderful shelter of all was that chosen by the doves.  They sat among the olive-trees, that were stirred by the evening breeze.  In this garden young girls dwelled, who were permitted to enter here because of their animal-like grace.  They included all the young girls who sighed and were like to honey-suckle; all the young girls who languish with all the doves that weep.  And all the doves were included here, those from Venice, whose wings were like cooling fans to the boredom of the wives of the doges, as well as those of Iberia whose lips had the orange and tobacco-yellow color of fisherwomen and their provocative allurement.  Here were all the doves of dreams, and all the dreaming doves:  the dove that drew Beatrice heavenward and to which Dante gave a grain of corn; and the one which the disenchanted Quitteria heard in the night.  Here was the dove which sobbed on Virginia’s shoulder, when during the night she sought in vain to calm the fires of her love in the spring underneath a cocoanut-palm.  And here too was the dove to which the heavy-hearted maiden at the waning of summer, in the orchard among the ripening peaches, confides passionate messages that it may bear them along in its flight into the unknown.

And there were the doves of old parsonages shrouded in roses, and those which Jocelyn with his incense-fragrant hand fed as he dreamed of Laurence.  And there was the dove which is given to the dying little girl, and that which in certain regions is placed upon the burning brow of the sick, and the blinded dove whose voice is so filled with pain that it lures the flight of its passing sisters toward the huntsman’s ambush, and the dove, the gentlest of all, who brings comfort to the forgotten old poet in his garret.

* * * * *

The third paradise was that of the sheep.

It lay in the heart of an emerald valley watered by streams, and beneath their sun-bathed crystal the grass was of a marvelous green.  And nearby was a lake, iridescent like mother-of-pearl and the feathers of a peacock; it was azure and glistened like mica, and seemed to be the breast of humming-birds and the wing of butterflies.  Here after they had licked the pure white salt from the golden-grained granite, the sheep dreamed their long dream, and their tufts of thick wool overlapped like the leaves of great branches covered with snow.

This landscape was so pure and of such dreamlike clarity that it had whitened the eye-lashes of the lambs, and had entered into their eyes of gold.  And the atmosphere was so transparent that it seemed one could see in the depth of the water clearly revealed the outlines of the yellow-striped summits of limestone.  Flowers of frost, of sky, and of blood were woven into the carpets of the forests of beech and fir.  After having passed over them the breeze went forth again even more softly, more fragrant, more ice-like in its purity.

Like a blue flood the marvelous cone-like trees, interwoven with silvery lichens, stretched upward.  Waterfalls as if suspended from the rocky crags, scattered in a smoke-like spray.  And suddenly the heavenly flocks sent forth their bleating toward God, and the ecstatic bells wept for the shadow of the ferns.  And the dark water of the grottoes broke in the light.