These words, it will be remembered, are addressed by Virgil, at the foot of the mountain of Purgatory, to Cato of Utica. Virgil is speaking of Dante, and of his mystical journey through the eternal world. The object of that quest, he says, is Liberty—that liberty which will make him master of himself morally and spiritually, when Virgil himself, at the summit of the Mountain, ere he takes his leave, shall crown him “King and bishop of his own mind and soul.”[35] ... Te sopra te corono e mitrio. These moving lines, as D’Ovidio reminds us,[36] have drawn tears from many a patriot of the last century; they may well form for us a starting-point for the consideration of Dante’s attitude towards Political Liberty. True, it is ultimately _spiritual_ liberty, liberty of soul, that the Poet “goes seeking” in his pilgrimage, even as it is slavery of soul from which he announces in Paradise[37] that Beatrice has delivered him. “Thou hast drawn me,” he says, “out of slavery into freedom ... thou has given health to my soul”— Tu m’ hai di servo tratto a libertate ... ... l’ anima mia ... fatt’ hai sana.... But the conditions of spiritual and of bodily freedom are very close to one another—as many a languishing prisoner of war can testify—interlaced and interwoven if not identical. Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage. It is possible, thank God, for the human spirit to rise superior to the most degrading conditions which inhuman brutality or fiendish hatred can impose. Yet an atmosphere of justice and peace is the right and normal environment for the soul’s free growth; and steady pressure of tyranny and calculated injustice will all but infallibly blunt and stunt the moral growth of its victims, as is witnessed by the universally blighting effect of Turkish rule. Moreover, unless the received political interpretation of the three Beasts of the Dark Wood[38] is wholly unwarranted, Professor D’Ovidio is right in claiming[39] that, in a true if subsidiary sense, Dante’s supernatural journey was “a refuge and a remedy” from the troubles in which the Poet found himself immersed in the tangled thicket[40] of an “enslaved Italy,” full of tyrants, and of that tyrannous faction-spirit which is the worst enemy of Freedom.[41] The Italy of his day, like the Florence which cast him out, is a stranger to that Liberty which only Peace can give—a peace for which, on Dante’s horizon, no other hope appeared than that of a common subjection to the “Roman Emperor,” the divinely appointed guardian of justice among men.[42] Peace is, indeed, so closely linked with freedom that Dante, in one place,[43] speaks of it as the goal of his mystic quest. Quella pace, che ... Di mondo in mondo cercar mi si face. whereas in the First Canto, Virgil has described that goal as liberty— Libertà va cercando....