Canto XXX. The wonderful light, our poet now perceives, emanates from a seven-branched candlestick, and illuminates all the heavens like an aurora borealis.  Then, amid the chanting, and while angels shower flowers down upon her, he beholds in the chariot a lady veiled in white, in whom, although transfigured, he instinctively recognizes Beatrice (a personification of Heavenly Wisdom).  In his surprise Dante impulsively turns toward Virgil, only to discover that he has vanished!

Beatrice comforts him, however, by promising to be his guide hereafter, and gently reproaches him for the past until he casts shamefaced glances at his feet.  There, in the stream (which serves as nature’s mirror), he catches a reflection of his utter loathsomeness, and becomes so penitent, that Beatrice explains she purposely brought him hither by the awful road he has travelled to induce him to lead a changed life hereafter.

Canto XXXI. Beatrice then accuses him of yielding to the world’s deceitful pleasures after she left him, and explains how he should, on the contrary, have striven to be virtuous so as to rejoin her.  When she finally forgives him and bids him gaze into her face once more, he sees she surpasses her former self in loveliness as greatly as on earth she outshone all other women.  Dante is so overcome by a sense of his utter unworthiness that he falls down unconscious, and on recovering his senses finds himself in the stream, upheld by the hand of a nymph (Matilda), who sweeps him along, “swift as a shuttle bounding o’er the wave,” while angels chant “Thou shalt wash me” and “I shall be whiter than snow.”

Freed from all haunting memories of past sins by Lethe’s waters, Dante finally lands on the “blessed shore.”  There Beatrice’s hand-maidens welcome him, and beseech her to complete her work by revealing her inner beauty to this mortal, so he can portray it for mankind.  But, although Dante gazes at her in breathless admiration, words fail him to render what he sees.

                        “O splendor! 
  O sacred light eternal! who is he,
  So pale with musing in Pierian shades,
  Or with that fount so lavishly imbued,
  Whose spirit should not fail him in the essay
  To represent thee such as thou didst seem,
  When under cope of the still-chiming heaven
  Thou gavest to open air thy charms reveal’d?”

Canto XXXII. Dante is still quenching a “ten-years thirst” by staring at his beloved, when her attendants admonish him to desist.  But, although he obediently turns aside his eyes, like a man who has gazed too long at the sun, he sees her image stamped on all he looks at.  He and Statius now humbly follow the glorious procession, which enters a forest and circles gravely round a barren tree-trunk, to which the chariot is tethered.  Immediately the dry branches burst into bud and leaf, and, soothed by angelic music, Dante falls asleep, only to be favored