t like those of falcons being tamed, would be unable to see anything sculpted, so that both their whip and their bridle are presented orally by disembodied voices. At the conclusion of canto 27, just before Dante's entry into the Earthly Paradise, Virgil addresses the following words to Dante. They are destined to be the last words he speaks before his own return to Limbo, and in a sense affirm the success of his own mission: "No longer expect word or sign from me. Free, upright, and whole is your will, and it would be wrong not to act according to its pleasure; wherefore I crown and miter you over yourself." Having freed himself from the causes of sin, and therefore, having perfected his will, Dante is finally free to do whatever he wants. The souls in Hell all sought a similar independence of will by a variety of shortcuts intended to circumvent the discipline so necessary to keep freedom from being self-destructive. Dante here is presented as having finally become a law unto himself, not by resisting the law of God, but by integrating that law into his own personality. Virgil expresses this independence in a characteristically Dantesque way. Our hero has become his own state and church, his own emperor and bishop. Once back at the Earthly Paradise, Beatrice returns to Dante's life. The fiction would have it that he has not seen her for ten years, not since her death in 1290. The meaning of this moment, simultaneously historical and allegorical (hence, figurative), is complex. His first reaction is quasi-sexual; he first notices Virgil's disappearance after he had turned to say "I recognize the tokens of the ancient flame" (Purg. 30. 47-48). When he finds Virgil gone, he weeps only to be scolded by Beatrice in a 14th-century Italian version of the parental line, "now I'll give you something to cry about." It is his own former sinfulness he should be crying about, not Virgil's disappearance, and by the next canto he does just that, bem...
