that you may rejoice with me now that Italy is found." "Oh, my father! and must we think that there are souls that fly hence aloft into the upper air, and thus return to the sluggish fellowship of the body? can their longing for light be so mad, as this?" "I will tell you, my son, 5 nor hold you longer in doubt." So replies Anchises, and unfolds the story in order.
"Know, first, that heaven and earth, and the watery plains, and the Moon's lucid ball, and Titan's starry fires are kept alive by a spirit within: a mind pervading each 10 limb stirs the whole frame and mingles with the mighty mass. Hence spring the races of men and beasts, and living things with wings, and the strange forms that Ocean carries beneath his marble surface. These particles have a fiery glow, a heavenly nature, struggling against 15 the clogs of corrupting flesh, the dulness of limbs of clay and bodies ready to die. Hence come their fears and lusts, their joys and griefs: nor can they discern the heavenly light, prisoned as they are in night and blind dungeon walls. Nay, when life's last ray has faded from 20 them, not even, then, poor wretches, are they wholly freed from ill, freed from every plague of the flesh: those many taints must needs be ingrained strangely in the being, so long as they have grown with it. So they are schooled with punishment, and pay in suffering for ancient ill: 25 some are hung up and dispread to the piercing winds: others have the stain of wickedness washed out under the whelming gulf, or burnt out with fire: each is chastised in his own spirit: then we are sped through the breadth of Elysium, while some few remain to inhabit these happy 30 plains, till the lapse of ages, when time's cycle is complete, has cleansed the ingrained blot and left a pure residue of heavenly intelligence, the flame of essential ether. All of these, when they have rounded the circle of a thousand years, Heaven summons to the stream of 35 Lethe, a mighty concourse, to the end that with memory effaced they may return to the vault of the sky, and learn to wish for a new union with the body."
