ve.
This is stressed by the poet's representing the apparitions first as
faint yet beautiful outlines of human features, then as ascent is made
to the other Heavens, the spirits make themselves known by increasing
manifestations of light so dazzling finally that the splendor would
blind Dante if his vision were not divinely adapted to its supernatural
needs.

The inequalities of bliss are also symbolized by the sphere in which the
spirits appear to him; those in the sphere of the moon, e.g., are less
favored than those in the Heaven of Mercury. The inequality of merit,
and therefore of reward, is also declared by the difference in both the
quickness of the spirits' movement and their clearness of vision into
the essence of God. The Empyrean, it is worth while repeating, is the
only true Paradise, the nine Heavens being only myths or poetic devices.
If spirits are seen there, they have come forth only from the Empyrean
and will quickly return there after preparing the poet for the eternal
Light of Light.

The materials out of which Dante constructs his Paradiso are not, as we
are already aware, fantastic images such as he employed for the first
two parts of the Divina Commedia, but are things of the spirit, viz.,
knowledge, beauty, faith, love, joy; and he is aided in making visible
those invisible entities of the spiritual life by such intangible things
as sound, motion and light.

Light, indeed, is one of the leading elements in the Paradiso. The poem
begins with a reference to the light of God's glory, and its last line
speaks of "the Love which moves the Sun and the other stars." And
between this beginning and this end in thirty-three cantiche light is
represented not only by degrees of increasing intensity and variety of
unlocked for movements but as surrounding the spirits, living flames,
and constituting, symbolically, the beatitude of Heaven.

Dean Church, in his classic essay on Dante, has a beautiful paragraph
that here calls for quotation: "Light in general is his special and
chosen source of poetic beauty. No poet that we know has shown such
singular sensibility to its varied appearances.... Light everywhere--in
the sky and earth and sea--in the stars, the flames, the lamp, the
gems--broken in the water, reflected from the mirror, transmitted
through the glass, or colored through the edge of the fractured
emerald--dimmed in the mist. The halo, the deep water--streaming through
the rent cloud, glowing in