As a little cloud ascends, so moved each flame along the throat of the chasm, none showing its theft, each stealing away a sinner. I. xxvi. 39. Such narrative progress in detail is integral with the progress of the total symbolism toward culmination. The famous ascent in Paradise moves both in and by itself and with the movement of the whole. Now were my eyes fixed again on the face of my lady, and my mind with them, and from every other thought were removed. And she smiled not; but “Were I to smile”, she began, “thou wouldst fare as Semele when she turned to ashes; For my beauty, which up the stair of the eternal palace kindleth more and more, as thou hast seen, the higher it ascends, Were it not tempered, is so radiant that thy mortal power at its flash would be foliage shriveled by thunderbolt.” III. xxi. 1. In method, as in degree, this is the individual achievement of a great poet; in kind the symbolism is characteristically medieval. For in detail and in total conception the _Divina Commedia_ starts not with the individual event or person, not with Beatrice Portinari,[21] but with the idea. Whether Dante recalls a youthful love is a question so subordinate as to be artistically immaterial. He has not sublimated earthly passion into heavenly. His conception is heavenly from the beginning, and progressively throughout. He carries a single, controlling idea forward imaginatively, stage by stage. Each stage is vivid with intensely specific realism; but this realism, as that of the carved capitals, is neither the object nor the occasion; it is only the imaginative means to impress the idea. The idea is constant; it is beginning and end. The final vision is not transformation; it is conclusion. Such grasp of poetic movement doubtless owed much to Vergil. Dante’s homage to the “courteous soul of Mantua” (I. ii. 58) is more than conventional tribute. Art thou then that Vergil and that spring which spreads so large a stream of speech?... O poet’s honor and light, may the long zeal avail me and the great love which made me search thy volume. Thou art my master and my author, thou alone he from whom I took the fair style that hath brought me honor. I. i. 79.[22] The larger narrative movement of the _Æneid_, which quite escaped the average medieval romancer, was not lost on so great a composer. Of all the ancient art available in his time this alone could give him that instruction. But if the _Æneid_ inspired him with its poetic scope and reach, and gave him a sense of the poetic energy of onwardness, it did not prescribe his method. The _Divina Commedia_ is not an imitation of the _Æneid_. Its movement is both different and more compelling.