Sometimes an animal, which is covered up, so stirs, that his desire must needs become apparent through the corresponding movement which that which wraps him makes; and in like manner the first soul made evident to me, through its covering, how gladly it came to do me pleasure. Then it breathed, “Without its being uttered to me by thee, I better discern thy wish, than thou whatever thing is most certain to thee; because I see it in the truthful mirror which makes of Itself a likeness of other tbings, while nothing makes for It a likeness of Itself.[1] Thou wouldst hear how long it is since God placed me in the lofty garden where this Lady disposed thee for so long a stairway; and how long it was a delight to my eyes; and the proper cause of the great wrath; and the idiom which I used and which I made. Now, my son, the tasting of the tree was not by itself the cause of so long an exile, but only the overpassing of the bound. There whence thy Lady moved Virgil, I longed for this assembly during four thousand three hundred and two revolutions of the sun; and while I was on earth I saw him return to all the lights of his path nine hundred and thirty times. The tongue which I spoke was all extinct long before the people of Nimrod attempted their unaccomplishable work; for never was any product of the reason (because of human liking, which alters, following the heavens) durable for ever.[2] A natural action it is for man to speak; but, thus or thus, nature then leaves for you to do according as it pleases you. Before I descended to the infernal anguish, the Supreme Good, whence comes the gladness that swathes me, was on earth called I; EL it was called afterwards;[3] and that must needs be,[4] for the custom of mortals is as a leaf on a branch, which goes away and another comes. On the mountain which rises highest from the wave I was, with pure life and sinful, from the first hour to that which, when the sun changes quadrant, follows the sixth hour.”[5] [1] All things are seen in God as if reflected in a mirror; but nothing can reflect an image of God. “In the eternal Idea, as in a glass, the works of God are more perfectly seen than in themselves. . . . But it is impossible for a thing created to represent that which is increated.”—John Norton, The Orthodox Evangelist, 1554, p. 332. [2] Speech, a product of human reason, changes according to the pleasure of main, which alters from time to time under the influence of the heavens. [3] God was known in the primitive language by the sacred and mystical symbol I or J, the Hebrew letter Jod; afterwards by the term El: the first answering to Jehovah, the second to Elohim. [4] Such change in the name was inevitable, because of the changing customs of thought and speech. [5] Adam's stay in the Earthly Paradise on the summit of the mount of Purgatory was thus a little more than six hours; the sun changes quadrant with every six hours. CANTO XXVII.