THE EARTHLY PARADISE AND MATELDA.--The Earthly Paradise represents “blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of man’s natural powers” (_Mon._ iii. 16). This blessedness is found in the twofold exercise of the mind: the practical, which “consists in ourselves working virtuously, that is, in integrity, with prudence, with temperance, with fortitude, and with justice”; and the speculative, which consists “in considering the works of God and of nature” (_Conv._ iv. 22). In this Earthly Paradise, the music of whose birds and trees has surely passed into the wonderful six cantos that close the _Purgatorio_, Dante meets, amidst the flowers on Lethe’s banks, the glorified realisation of the Leah of his dream (_Purg._ xxviii.). She has been taken as symbolising the glorified active life in the state of recovered Eden, realising in the Church of Christ what Leah had dimly prefigured in the Old Testament; the active Christian life; _innocentia bonorum operum_, the virtuous use of earthly things, directly ordered to the love of our neighbour; the temporal felicity of the Earthly Paradise. Since the purgatorial process is the freeing of the soul from disordered love, we may follow Richard’s interpretation of Leah, and take her as representing love rightly ordered and inflamed by divine inspiration. Presently she is called Matelda (xxxiii. 119), and it is probable that she is the idealised presentment of a real person. All the earliest commentators, excepting the _Ottimo_, identify her with the great Countess of Tuscany, in support of which view might be urged the historical work of the Countess in the revival of the study of Roman Law at Bologna--Roman Law being, for Dante, the secular counterpart of the “perfect law of liberty.” Some modern commentators prefer to seek her prototype in one or other of the ladies of _Vita Nuova_; for instance, in that lady of very sweet speech who had rebuked Dante at the crisis of his “new life.” Others have attempted to identify her with Mechthild of Magdeburg or Mechthild of Hackeborn, two German mystical writers of the latter part of the thirteenth century whose works show occasional analogies with the _Commedia_. It may be observed that her counterpart, as Rachel to Leah, is not Beatrice, as sometimes supposed, but St. Bernard, in the closing cantos of the _Paradiso_. Matelda explains her joyous aspect by referring Dante to the Psalm _Delectasti_ (Ps. 92, 91 Vulgate), and her discourse of Eden and its rivers (realising the Golden Age sung by the classical poets) communicates to Virgil and Statius her own celestial joy: “Thou has given me, O Lord, a delight in what Thou hast made: in the works of Thy hands I shall rejoice.” She points out to Dante’s gaze the wondrous pageant, which astonishes Virgil as much as his pupil, the mystical procession that represents the triumphal march of the Church (_Purg._ xxix.).