happened that, passing through the street, she turned her eyes to the
spot where I stood, and with ineffable courtesy she greeted me; and this
had such an effect on me that it seemed I had reached the furthest
limit of blessedness. I took refuge in the solitude of my chamber; and,
thinking over what had happened to me, I proposed to write a sonnet,
since I had already acquired the art of putting words into rhyme," This,
from his "Vita Nuova," his first work, relating to the "new life" which
this love awoke in his young soul.

Thus, according to Dante's own statement, was the seed of a never-ending
passion planted in his soul,--the small beginning, so insignificant to
cynical eyes, that it would almost seem preposterous to allude to it; as
if this fancy for a little girl in scarlet, and in a boy but nine years
of age, could ripen into anything worthy to be soberly mentioned by a
grave and earnest poet, in the full maturity of his genius,--worthy to
give direction to his lofty intellect, worthy to be the occasion of the
greatest poem the world has seen from Homer to modern times. Absurd!
ridiculous! Great rivers cannot rise from such a spring; tall trees
cannot grow from such a little acorn. Thus reasons the man who does not
take cognizance of the mighty mysteries of human life. If anything
tempted the boy to write sonnets to a little girl, it must have been the
chivalric element in society at that period, when even boys were
required to choose objects of devotion, and to whom they were to be
loyal, and whose honor they were bound to defend. But the grave poet, in
the decline of his life, makes this simple confession, as the beginning
of that sentiment which never afterwards departed from him, and which
inspired him to his grandest efforts.

But this youthful attachment was unfortunate. Beatrice did not return
his passion, and had no conception of its force, and perhaps was not
even worthy to call it forth. She may have been beautiful; she may have
been gifted; she may have been commonplace. It matters little whether
she was intellectual or not, beautiful or not. It was not the flesh and
blood he saw, but the image of beauty and loveliness which his own mind
created. He idealized the girl; she was to him all that he fancied. But
she never encouraged him; she denied his greetings, and even avoided his
society. At last she died, when he was twenty-seven, and left him--to
use his own expression--"to ruminate on death, and en