and warming herself in the rays of Love, or ‘actual speculation,’ that is, ‘where love makes its peace felt.’2 That she was the symbol of this is evident from the previous dream of Dante,3 in which he sees Leah, the universally accepted type of it,Who went along
Singing and culling floweret after floweret.
that is to say, of good works. She, having ‘washed him thoroughly from sin,’4Walking in a meadow,
Gathering flowers; and singing she was saying,
‘Know whosoever may my name demand
That I am Leah, who go moving round
My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,’
who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the Practical Life, which he had seen when he came out of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin, and arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That these were the special virtues of practical goodness Dante had already told us in a passage before quotedAll dripping brought
Into the dance of the four beautiful,Purgatorio, XXXI. 103,10.
