possessed me which made me pardon
everyone who had done me wrong." Under the influence of her salutation,
Dante tells us that he devised this sonnet:

"So gentle and so gracious doth appear
My lady when she giveth her salute
That every tongue becometh, trembling, mute:
Nor do the eyes to look upon her dare
Although she hears her praises, she doth go
Benignly vested with humility:
And like a thing come down, she seems to be,
From heaven to earth, a miracle to show.
So pleaseth she whoever cometh nigh.
She gives the heart a sweetness through the eyes,
Which none can understand who doth not prove
And from her countenance there seems to move
A spirit, sweet, and in Love's very guise,
Who to the soul, in going sayeth: 'Sigh.'"
(Norton's translation.)

Because she now denies to him the bliss of salutation he says: "I went
into a solitary place to bathe the earth with most bitter tears." But
this misunderstanding is not his only torment. Almost from his second
meeting he fears that his beloved will soon die. His prophetic vision
becomes an agonising reality when in 1290 in her twenty-fourth year, the
eyes that radiated bliss are closed in death.

So stunned was he by the blow that his life was despaired of. When he
recovered it seemed to him that Florence had lost her gaiety and
desolate is mourning the loss of his beloved one. Pilgrims passing on
their way to Galicia do not appear to share the general grief. To arouse
their sympathy in the loss which the city has sustained the heart-broken
poet lover devises a sonnet "in which I set forth that which I had said
to myself.

Pilgrims:
If through your will to hear, awhile ye stay,
Truly my heart with sighs declare to me
That ye shall afterwards depart in tears.
Alas her Beatrice now lost hath she.
And all the words that one of her way may say
Have virtue to make weep whoever hears."

(Norton's translation.)

In his great affliction his grieving heart is sustained by his belief in
immortality. His vision penetrates the skies and he sees his 'lady of
virtue' in glory in the regions of the eternal.

"The gentle lady to my mind had come
Who, for the sake of her exceeding youth,
Had by the Lord most High been ta'en from earth
To that calm heaven where Mary hath her home."

In heaven indeed more than upon earth she enamours the poet. There
divested of her mortal veil, to his eyes she

"grew perf