t beautiful and touching
invention: the glorified Christ, returning from Limbo, takes the happy,
delivered souls to visit his mother.

"And Messer Giesu having tarried awhile with them in that place, said:
'Now let us go and make my mother happy, who with most gentle tears is
calling upon me.' And they went forthwith, and came to the room where
our Lady was praying, and with gentle tears asking God to give her
back her son, saying it was to-day the third day. And as she stayed
thus, Messer Giesu drew near to her on one side, and said: 'Peace and
cheerfulness be with thee, Holy Mother.' And straightway she recognised
the voice of her blessed son, and opened her eyes and beheld him thus
glorious, and threw herself down wholly on the ground and worshipped
him. And the Lord Jesus knelt himself down like her; and then they rose
to their feet and embraced one another most sweetly, and gave each other
peace, and then went and sat together," while all the holy people from
Limbo looked on in admiration, and knelt down one by one, first the
Baptist, and Adam and Eve, and all the others, saluting the mother of
Christ, while the angels sang the end of all sorrows.

VII

There would be much to say on this subject. One might point out, for
instance, not only that Dante has made the lady he loved in his youth
into the heroine--a heroine smiling in fashion more womanlike than
theological--of his vision of hell and heaven; but what would have been
even less possible at any previous moment of the world's history, he
has interwoven his theogony so closely with strands of most human
emotion and passion (think of that most poignant of love dramas in the
very thick of hell!), that, instead of a representation, a chart, so to
speak, of long-forgotten philosophical systems, his poem has become a
picture, pattern within pattern, of the life of all things: flowers
blowing, trees waving, men and women moving and speaking in densest
crowds among the flaming rocks of hell, the steps of purgatory, the
planispheres of heaven's stars making the groundwork of that wondrous
tapestry. But it is better to read Dante than to read about Dante, so I
let him be.

On the other hand, and lest some one take Puritanic umbrage at my
remarks on early Italian art, and deprecate the notion that religious
painters could be so very human, I shall say a few parting words about
the religious painter, the saint _par excellence_, I mean the Blessed
Angelico. Heaven