or a moment had seemed our love; then a
new phase of impressions has set in, and the "Vita Nuova" inspires us
with mere passionate awe: awe before this passion which we feel to be no
longer our own, but far above and distant from us, as in some rarer
stratum of atmosphere; awe before this woman who creates it, or rather
who is its creation. Even as Dante fancied that the people of Florence
did when the bodily presence of this lady came across their path, so do
we cast down our glance as the image of Beatrice passes across our mind.
Nay, the glory of her, felt so really while reading the few, meagre
words in the book, is stored away in our heart, and clothes with a faint
aureole the lady--if ever in our life we chance to meet her--in whom,
though Dante tells us nothing of stature, features, eyes or hair, we
seem to recognize a likeness to her on whose passage "ogni lingua divien
tremando muta, e gli occhi non ardiscon di guardare." Passion like this,
to paraphrase a line of Rossetti's, is genius; and it arouses in such as
look upon it the peculiar sense of wonder and love, of awe-stricken
raising up of him who contemplates, which accompanies the contemplation
of genius.

But it may be that one day we feel, instead of this, wonder indeed, but
wonder mingled with doubt. This ideal love, which craves for no union
with its object; which seeks merely to see, nay, which is satisfied with
mere thinking on the beloved one, will strike us with the cold and
barren glitter of the miraculous. This Beatrice, as we gaze on her, will
prove to be no reality of flesh and blood like ourselves; she is a form
modelled in the semblance of that real, living woman who died six
centuries ago, but the substance of which is the white fire of Dante's
love. And the thought will arise that this purely intellectual love of a
scarce-noticed youth for a scarce-known woman is a thing which does not
belong to life, neither sweetening nor ennobling any of its real
relations; that it is, in its dazzling purity and whiteness, in fact a
mere strange and sterile death light, such as could not and should not,
in this world of ours, exist twice over. And, lest we should ever be
tempted to think of this ideal love for Beatrice as of a wonderful and
beautiful, but scarcely natural or useful phenomenon, I would wish to
study the story of its origin and its influence. I would wish to show
that had it not burned thus strangely concentrated and pure, the poets
of suc