“The Love which quieteth this Heaven always welcomes to itself with such a salutation, in order to make the candle ready for its flame.” No sooner had these brief words come within me than I comprehended that I was surmounting above my own power; and I rekindled me with a new vision, such that no light is so pure that my eyes had not sustained it. And I saw light in form of a river, bright with effulgence, between two banks painted with a marvellous spring. Out of this stream were issuing living sparks, and on every side were setting themselves in the flowers, like rubies which gold encompasses. Then, as if inebriated by the odors, they plunged again into the wonderful flood, and as one was entering another was issuing forth. “The high desire which now inflames and urges thee to have knowledge concerning that which thou seest, Pleases me the more the more it swells, but thou must needs drink of this water before so great a thirst, in thee be slaked.” Thus the Sun of my eyes said to me; thereon she added, “The stream, and the topazes which enter and issue, and the smiling of the herbage, are foreshadowing prefaces of their truth;[1] not that these things are in themselves immature,[2] but there is defect on thy part who hast not yet vision so lofty.” [1] The stream, the sparks, the flowers are not such in reality as they seem to be; they are but images foreshadowing the truth. [2] The things show themselves as they are, but the eyes cannot yet see them correctly. There is no babe who so hastily springs with face toward the milk, if he awake much later than his wont, as I did, to make better mirrors yet of my eyes, stooping to the wave which flows in order that one may be bettered in it. And even as the eaves of my eyelids drank of it, so it seemed to me from its length to become round. Then as folk who have been under masks, who seem other than before, if they divest themselves of the semblance not their own in which they disappeared, thus for me the flowers and the sparks were changed into greater festival, so that I saw both the Courts of Heaven manifest. O splendor of God, by means of which I saw the high triumph of the true kingdom, give me power to tell how I saw it!