O ye, who are in a little bark, desirous to listen, following
behind my craft which singing passes on, turn to see again Your
shores; put not out upon the deep; for haply losing me, ye would
remain astray. The water that I sail was never crossed. Minerva
inspires, and Apollo guides me, and nine Muses point out to me
the Bears.

Ye other few, who have lifted tip your necks be. times to the
bread of the Angels, oil which one here subsists, but never
becomes sated of it, ye may well put forth your vessel over the
salt deep, keeping my wake before you on the water which turns
smooth again. Those glorious ones who passed over to Colchos
wondered not as ye shall do, when they saw Jason become a
ploughman.

The concreate and perpetual thirst for the deiform realm was
bearing us on swift almost as ye see the heavens. Beatrice was
looking upward, and I upon her, and perhaps in such time as a
quarrel[1] rests, and flies, and from the notch is unlocked,[2] I
saw myself arrived where a wonderful thing drew my sight to
itself; and therefore she, from whom the working of my mind could
not be hid, turned toward me, glad as beautiful. "Uplift thy
grateful mind to God," she said to me, "who with the first
star[3] has conjoined us."

[1] The bolt for a cross-bow.

[2] The inverse order indicates the instantaneousness of the act.