We have been in a land where none of the fair sounds or sights of nature have access, no flowers, no stars, no light, and if there are streams and hills there they are hideously transformed into instruments and emblems not of beauty but of horror. We are made to realise all this, and to feel that it is absolutely and eternally fitting as the abode of sin and of impenitence. And when once this association has been stamped upon our minds, the beauty and the sweetness of the world in which we live gain a new meaning for us. They become the standing protest of all that is round us against every selfish, every sinful thought or deed; the standing appeal to us to bring our souls into sweet harmony with their surroundings, since God in His mercy brings not their surroundings into ghastly harmony with them. When we have been with the poor wretch, deep down in Hell, who gasps in his burning fever for 'the rivulets that from the green slopes of Casentino drop down into the Arno, freshening the soft, cool channels, where they glide,'[48] and have realised that in that land there are not and ought not to be the cooling streams and verdant slopes of earth; we can never again enjoy the sweetness and the peace of nature without our hearts being consciously or unconsciously purified, without every evil thing in our lives feeling the rebuke. When we have known what it is to be in a starless land, and have felt how strange and incongruous the fair sights of Heaven would be, have felt that they would have no place or meaning there, have felt that cheerless gloom alone befits the souls enveloped there, then when we leave the dreary realms, and once more gaze upon the heavens by night and day, they are more to us than they have ever been before, they are indeed what Dante so often calls them, using the language of the falconers, the _lure_ by which God summons back our wayward souls from vain and mean pursuits. Look, again, upon this fearful picture. Dante and Virgil come to a black and muddy lake in which the passionate tear and smite one another in bestial rage; and all over its surface are bubbles rising up. They come from the cries of the morose and sullen ones 'who are fixed in the slime at the bottom of the lake. They cry: "Gloomy we were in the sweet air that the sun gladdens, bearing in our hearts the smoke of sullenness; now we are gloomy here in the black slime"--such is the strain that gurgles in their throats, but cannot find full utterance.'[49] Who that has seen those bubbles rise upon the lake can ever suffer himself again to cherish sullenness within his heart without feeling at the very instant the rebuke of the 'sweet air that the sun gladdens,' and thinking of that gurgling strain of misery? * * * * *