It is this background of noble scenery, of landscape and skyscape, of slope and scarp, of Flowery Valley and Divine Forest, of star-light and dawn, of sunrise and high noon and sunset—it is this that gives its peculiar beauty to the second _Cantica_ of the _Divine Comedy_. But this open-air Purgatory is more than a clever artifice, by which a fine dramatic contrast is produced after the murk and gloom of the _Inferno_. It is, as we have seen, essential to Dante’s conception of the perfect work of penitence in man, that it should draw his footsteps up to the Earthly Paradise, the primal home of Innocence. And so the background of the _Purgatorio_, as it were inevitably, completes the illusion of “naturalness” in the world beyond, and enforces the parallel between the upward struggle of those elect spirits and our own daily pilgrimage in this life. It suggests further, all that the magic phrase “Open Air” means to our modern ears: that healthy out-door life, nurse of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, that life of robust activities in close contact with external Nature of which the prime importance is recognised by all schools of thought in the world of modern education. Finally (and here we touch upon one of the most beautiful features of Dante’s conception), the spiritual atmosphere, in spite of purgatorial framework of the Seven Sins, is not that of the Decalogue, but of the Beatitudes. The Sins themselves are interpreted as disordered Love, and the manifold love which goes up to make a Saint is expressed in sweetest harmony when each successive barrier is passed.[217] Love is the atmosphere, and Love the supreme lesson, the learning whereof continues beyond the grave. The conception of Love as the universal motive power, expressed at length in _Purg._ xvii. 91 _sqq._— Nè creator nè creatura mai Cominciò el, figliuol, fu sanza amore ... suggests a comparison of Dante’s psychology with that of the most modern school. In an age when (as a glance at Fra Salimbene’s pages will demonstrate)—pages written, it must be remembered, for the eye of a Sister of the Order of Sta Clara!—something more than Elizabethan broadness of speech was not uncommon, Dante pours out volumes of prose and verse, every line of which may be said to be suitable _pour les jeunes filles_. He would scarcely have subscribed to that domination of the Sex-instinct which is an axiom of the Freudian psychology. In the lines referred to above he more or less adumbrates the doctrine of “Libido”; but it does not occur to him to label that psychic force with so doubtfully reputable a name as “Libido.” The noble title “Amor” is for him, as for earlier philosophers, the more appropriate one.