There, in a harmonious circle, float the prayers of little children, the orisons of virgins, the psalms of holy hermits, the petitions of the humble, the chaste words of the pure in heart, the resigned moans of those in pain, the sobs of souls that suffer and the hymns of souls that hope. Teobaldo heard among those voices, that throbbed still in the luminous ether, the voice of his sainted mother who prayed to God for him; but he heard no prayer of his own.
Further on, thousands on thousands of harsh, rough accents wounded his ears with a discordant roar,--blasphemies, cries for vengeance, drinking songs, indecencies, curses of despair, threats of the helpless, and sacrilegious oaths of the impious.
Teobaldo traversed the second circle with the rapidity of a meteor crossing the sky in a summer evening, that he might not hear his own voice which vibrated there thunderously loud, exceeding all other voices in the stress of that infernal concert.
“I do not believe in God! I do not believe in God!” still spake his tone beating through that ocean of blasphemies; and Teobaldo began to believe.
He left those regions behind him and crossed other illimitable spaces full of terrible visions, which neither could he comprehend nor am I able to conceive, and finally he came to the uppermost circle of the spiral heavens, where the seraphim adore Jehovah, covering their faces with their triple wings and prostrate at His feet.
A waft of fire scorched his face, a sea of light darkened his eyes, unbearable thunder resounded in his ears and, caught from his charger and hurled into the void, like an incandescent stone shot out from a volcano, he felt himself falling, and falling without ever alighting, blind, burned and deafened, as the rebellious angel fell when God overthrew with a breath the pedestal of his pride.
Night had shut in, and the wind moaned as it stirred the leaves of the trees, through whose luxuriant foliage was slipping a soft ray of moonlight, when Teobaldo, rising upon his elbow and rubbing his eyes as if awakening from profound slumber, looked about him and found himself in the same wood where he had wounded the boar, where his steed fell dead, where was given him that phantasmal courser which had rushed him away to unknown, mysterious realms.