Nel giallo della rosa sempiterna, Che si dilata, rigrada, e redole Odor di lode al Sol, che sempre verna, Qual'è colui, che tace e dicer vuole, Mi trasse Beatrice, e disse; mira Quanto è 'l convento delle bianche stole! Vedi nostra Città quanto ella gira! Vedi li nostri scanni sì ripieni, Che poca gente omai ci si disira. * * * * In forma dunque di candida rosa Mi si mostrava la milizia santa, Che nel suo sangue Cristo fece sposa.--_Parad._ 30, 31.] But this universal reference to the religious ideas of the Church is so natural, so unaffected, that it leaves him at full liberty in other orders of thought. He can afford not to be conventional--he can afford to be comprehensive and genuine. It has been remarked how, in a poem where there would seem to be a fitting place for them, the ecclesiastical legends of the middle ages are almost entirely absent. The sainted spirits of the _Paradiso_ are not exclusively or chiefly the Saints of popular devotion. After the Saints of the Bible, the holy women, the three great Apostles, the Virgin mother, they are either names personally dear to the poet himself, friends whom he had loved, and teachers to whom he owed wisdom--or great men of masculine energy in thought or action, in their various lines "compensations and antagonists of the world's evils"--Justinian and Constantine, and Charlemagne--the founders of the Orders, Augustine, Benedict, and Bernard, Francis and Dominic--the great doctors of the Schools, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventura, whom the Church had not yet canonized. And with them are joined--and that with a full consciousness of the line which theology draws between the dispensations of nature and grace--some rare types of virtue among the heathen. Cato is admitted to the outskirts of Purgatory; Trajan, and the righteous king of Virgil's poem, to the heaven of the just.[109] [Footnote 109: Chi crederebbe giù nel mondo errante, Che Rifèo Trojano[A] in questo tondo Fosse la quinta delle luci sante? Ora conosce assai di quel, che 'l mondo Veder non può della divina grazia; Benchè sua vista non discerna il fondo.--_Parad._ c. 20.] [Footnote A: Rhipeus justissimus unus Qui fuit in Teucris, et servantissimus æqui.--_Æn._ ii.]