uisite beauty the finest poems of this school,
showed how he had read into them his own spirit, when he drew the
beautiful design for the frontispiece of his collection. These two
lovers--the youth kneeling in his cloth of silver robe, lifting his long
throbbing neck towards the beloved; the lady stooping down towards him,
raising him up and kissing him; the mingled cloud of waving hair, the
four tight-clasped hands, the four tightly glued lips, the profile
hidden by the profile, the passion and the pathos, the eager, wistful
faces, nay, the very splendour of brocade robes and jewels, the very
sweetness of blooming rose spaliers; all this is suitable to illustrate
this group of sonnets or that of the "House of Life;" but it is false,
false in efflorescence and luxuriance of passion, splendour and colour
of accessory, to the poetry of these early Tuscans. Imaginative their
poetry certainly is, and passionate; indeed the very concentration of
imaginative passion; but imagination and passion unlike those of all
other poets; perhaps because more rigorously reduced to their elements:
imagination purely of the heart, passion purely of the intellect,
neither of the senses: love in its most essential condition, but, just
because an essence, purged of earthly alloys, rarefied, sublimated into
a cultus or a philosophy.

These poems might nearly all have been written by one man, were it
possible for one man to vary from absolute platitude to something like
genius, so homogeneous is their tone: everywhere do we meet the same
simplicity of diction struggling with the same complication and subtlety
of thought, the same abstract speculation strangely mingled with most
individual and personal pathos. The mode of thinking and feeling, the
conception of all the large characteristics of love, and of all its
small incidents are, in this _cycle_ of poets, constantly the same; and
they are the same in the "Vita Nuova;" Dante having, it would seem,
invented and felt nothing unknown to his immediate predecessors and
contemporaries, but merely concentrated their thoughts and feelings by
the greater intenseness of his genius. This platonic love of Dante's
days is, as I have said, a passion sublimated into a philosophy and a
cultus. The philosophy of love engages much of these poets' attention;
all have treated of it, but Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's elder brother in
poetry, is love's chief theologian. He explains, as Eckhardt or
Bonaventura might e