This is the translation--Dante speaking in the first person says: "At the close of my ninth year I experienced strong impressions of religion. This was the time of my Confirmation and my First Communion. I was filled with reverence for the wondrous truths instilled into my mind by those whom I loved best: and my whole being glowed with the roseate glow of a first love. My feelings were rapturous yet constant; and from that time I date the beginning of a New Life. From that time forward I was so completely under the influence of this divine principle that my soul was, as it were, espoused to heavenly love, and it was in the precepts and ordinances of the Church that this passion found its proper satisfaction. Often and often did it lead me to the congregation of the faithful, where I had meetings with my youthful angel and these were so gratifying that all through my boyhood I would frequently go in search of a repetition of those pleasures and I perceived her so noble and admirable in all her bearings, that of her might assuredly be said that saying of Homer: 'She seemed no daughter of mortal man but of God.'" We need not be surprised that there is such divergence of opinion among critics as to the interpretation of Dante. He himself in The Banquet (bk. II, ch. 15), written some years after his New Life, tells us that there is a hidden meaning back of the literal interpretation of his words. That is especially true of the Divine Comedy, as he writes to Can Grande in explanation of the purpose of the poem. In the Paradiso he bids this lacking in power of penetration to pierce the symbolism, to accompany him no longer on his journey through the invisible world. "O ye who in some pretty little boat Eager to listen, have been following Behind my ship, that singing sails along, Turn back to look again upon your shores, Do not put out to sea, lest, peradventure, In losing me, you might yourselves be lost." (Par. bk. II, I.) With obscurity thus acknowledged, is it any wonder that Dante is subjected to prolonged controversy by historical criticism which has not hesitated to cast doubt upon the authorship of the Iliad and the Synotic Gospels? In the face of this obscurity it is the opinion of such well known Dantian scholars as D'Ancona, Charles Eliot Norton, John Addington Symonds, Dean Plumtre, Edmund Gardiner, W.W. Vernon, Paget Toynbe, C.H. Grandgent, Jefferson B. Fletcher, James Russell Lowell--that Beatrice is both a real human being and a symbol.