Throughout Purgatory Dante is still led and instructed by Virgil. I think there is nothing in the whole Comedy so pathetic as the passages in which the fate of Virgil, to be cut off for ever from the light of God, is contrasted with the hope of the souls in Purgatory. The sweetness and beauty of Virgil's character as conceived by Dante grow steadily upon us throughout this poem, until they make the contemplation of his fate and the patient sadness with which he speaks of it more heartrending than anything that we have heard or seen in Hell. After this we hardly need to hear from Dante the direct expression he subsequently gives of his passionate thirst to know the meaning of so mysterious a decree as that which barred Heaven against the unbaptised. In Purgatory, Virgil and Dante meet the emancipated soul of the Roman poet Statius, freed at last after many centuries of purifying pain, and ready now to ascend to Heaven. Virgil asks him how he became a Christian, and Statius refers him to his own words in one of the Eclogues, regarded in those days as containing a prophecy of Christ. 'Thou,' says Statius, 'didst first guide me to Parnassus to drink in its grottoes, and afterwards thou first didst light me unto God. When thou didst sing, "The season is renewed, justice returns, and the first age of man, and a new progeny descends from Heaven," thou wast as one who, marching through the darkness of the night, carries the light behind him, aiding not himself, but teaching those who follow him the way. Through thee was I a poet, and through thee a Christian.' Not a shade of envy, not a thought of resentment or rebellion, passes over Virgil's heart as he hears that while saving others he could not save himself.[75] But now, without dwelling further on the episodes of the poem, we must hasten to consider the most beautiful and profoundest of its closing scenes. Under Virgil's guidance Dante had traversed all the successive circles of the mount of Purgatory. He stood at its summit, in the earthly Paradise, the Garden of Eden which Eve had lost. There amid fairest sights and sounds he was to meet the glorified Beatrice, and she was to be his guide in Heaven as Virgil had been his guide in Hell and Purgatory. In any degree to understand what follows we must try to realise the intimate blending of lofty abstract conceptions and passionate personal emotions and reminiscences in Dante's thoughts of Beatrice.