With these verses in our minds, while wandering down the grassy aisles, beside the waters of the solitary place, we seem to meet that lady singing as she went, and plucking flower by flower, ’like Proserpine when Ceres lost a daughter, and she lost her spring.’  There, too, the vision of the griffin and the car, of singing maidens, and of Beatrice descending to the sound of Benedictus and of falling flowers, her flaming robe and mantle green as grass, and veil of white, and olive crown, all flashed upon the poet’s inner eye, and he remembered how he bowed before her when a boy.  There is yet another passage in which it is difficult to believe that Dante had not the pine-forest in his mind.  When Virgil and the poet were waiting in anxiety before the gates of Dis, when the Furies on the wall were tearing their breasts and crying, ’Venga Medusa, e si ’l farem di smalto,’ suddenly across the hideous river came a sound like that which whirlwinds make among the shattered branches and bruised stems of forest-trees; and Dante, looking out with fear upon the foam and spray and vapour of the flood, saw thousands of the damned flying before the face of one who forded Styx with feet unwet.  ‘Like frogs,’ he says, ’they fled, who scurry through the water at the sight of their foe, the serpent, till each squats and hides himself close to the ground.’  The picture of the storm among the trees might well have occurred to Dante’s mind beneath the roof of pine-boughs.  Nor is there any place in which the simile of the frogs and water-snake attains such dignity and grandeur.  I must confess that till I saw the ponds and marshes of Ravenna, I used to fancy that the comparison was somewhat below the greatness of the subject; but there so grave a note of solemnity and desolation is struck, the scale of Nature is so large, and the serpents coiling in and out among the lily leaves and flowers are so much in their right place, that they suggest a scene by no means unworthy of Dante’s conception.

Nor is Dante the only singer who has invested this wood with poetical associations.  It is well known that Boccaccio laid his story of ‘Honoria’ in the pine-forest, and every student of English literature must be familiar with the noble tale in verse which Dryden has founded on this part of the ‘Decameron.’  We all of us have followed Theodore, and watched with him the tempest swelling in the grove, and seen the hapless ghost pursued by demon hounds and hunter down the glades.  This story should be read while storms are gathering upon the distant sea, or thunderclouds descending from the Apennines, and when the pines begin to rock and surge beneath the stress of labouring winds.  Then runs the sudden flash of lightning like a rapier through the boughs, the rain streams hissing down, and the thunder ’breaks like a whole sea overhead.’