with
whose crystal purity the limpidest waters on earth were clouded. And yet
it flowed under a perpetual depth of shade, which no beam either of sun
or moon penetrated. Nevertheless the darkness was coloured with endless
diversities of May-blossoms; and the poet was standing in admiration,
looking up at it along its course, when he beheld something that took
away every other thought; to wit, a lady, all alone, on the other side
of the water, singing and culling flowers.

"Ah, lady!" said the poet, "who, to judge by the cordial beauty in thy
looks, hast a heart overflowing with love, be pleased to draw thee
nearer to the stream, that I may understand the words thou singest. Thou
remindest me of Proserpine, of the place she was straying in, and of
what sort of creature she looked, when her mother lost her, and she
herself lost the spring-time on earth."

As a lady turns in the dance when it goes smoothest, moving round with
lovely self-possession, and scarcely seeming to put one foot before
the other, so turned the lady towards the water over the yellow and
vermilion flowers, dropping her eyes gently as she came, and singing
so that Dante could hear her. Then when she arrived at the water, she
stopped, and raised her eyes towards him, and smiled, shewing him the
flowers in her hands, and shifting them with her fingers into a display
of all their beauties. Never were such eyes beheld, not even when Venus
herself was in love. The stream was a little stream; yet Dante felt
it as great an intervention between them, as if it had been Leander's
Hellespont.

The lady explained to him the nature of the place, and how the rivulet
was the Lethe of Paradise;--Lethe, where he stood, but called Eunoe
higher up; the drink of the one doing away all remembrance of evil
deeds, and that of the other restoring all remembrance of good.[54] It
was the region, she said, in which Adam and Eve had lived; and the poets
had beheld it perhaps in their dreams on Mount Parnassus, and hence
imagined their golden age;--and at these words she looked at Virgil and
Statius, who by this time had come up, and who stood smiling at her
kindly words.

Resuming her song, the lady turned and passed up along the rivulet the
contrary way of the stream, Dante proceeding at the same rate of time on
his side of it; till on a sudden she cried, "Behold, and listen!" and a
light of exceeding lustre came streaming through the woods, followed
by a dulcet melody. The