I resumed the delightful study of my poet.  Book in hand, I meditated upon the way in which those whom Love destroys with its cruel malady wander through the secret paths in the depth of the myrtle forest, and, as I meditated, the quivering reflections of the stars came and mingled with those of the leafless eglantines in the waters of the cloister fountain.  Suddenly the lights and the perfumes and the stillness of the sky were overwhelmed, a fierce Northwind charged with storm and darkness burst roaring upon me.  It lifted me up and carried me like a wisp of straw over fields, cities, rivers, and mountains, and through the midst of thunder-clouds, during a long night composed of a whole series of nights and days.  And when, after this prolonged and cruel rage, the hurricane was at last stilled, I found myself far from my native land at the bottom of a valley bordered by cypress trees.  Then a woman of wild beauty, trailing long garments behind her, approached me.  She placed her left hand on my shoulder, and, pointing her right arm to an oak with thick foliage: 

“Look!” said she to me.

Immediately I recognised the Sibyl who guards the sacred wood of Avernus, and I discerned the fair Proserpine’s beautiful golden twig amongst the tufted boughs of the tree to which her finger pointed.

“O prophetic Virgin,” I exclaimed, “thou hast comprehended my desire and thou hast satisfied it in this way.  Thou hast revealed to me the tree that bears the shining twig without which none can enter alive into the dwelling-place of the dead.  And in truth, eagerly did I long to converse with the shade of Virgil.”

Having said this, I snatched the golden branch from its ancient trunk and I advanced without fear into the smoking gulf that leads to the miry banks of the Styx, upon which the shades are tossed about like dead leaves.  At sight of the branch dedicated to Proserpine, Charon took me in his bark, which groaned beneath my weight, and I alighted on the shores of the dead, and was greeted by the mute baying of the threefold Cerberus.  I pretended to throw the shade of a stone at him, and the vain monster fled into his cave.  There, amidst the rushes, wandered the souls of those children whose eyes had but opened and shut to the kindly light of day, and there in a gloomy cavern Minos judges men.  I penetrated into the myrtle wood in which the victims of love wander languishing, Phaedra, Procris, the sad Eriphyle, Evadne, Pasiphae, Laodamia, and Cenis, and the Phoenician Dido.  Then I went through the dusty plains reserved for famous warriors.  Beyond them open two ways.  That to the left leads to Tartarus, the abode of the wicked.  I took that to the right, which leads to Elysium and to the dwellings of Dis.  Having hung the sacred branch at the goddess’s door, I reached pleasant fields flooded with purple light.  The shades of philosophers and poets hold grave converse there.  The Graces and the Muses formed sprightly