d have had to descend from
her pedestal and show herself a girl like all the rest. Not until after
her deification has become an established fact, does Beatrice (in the
beginning of the _Divine Comedy_) remember her lover and come to save
him. In one of his poems Dante says that not every woman could inspire
such a love, but only a woman of peculiar nobility of character. It is
very apparent that Dante, at first, was not sure of himself, and that he
only gradually discovered the new consciousness which was stirring his
soul; with every chapter the beloved recedes to a greater distance and
becomes more sacred to him.

It is quite in keeping with all this that our knowledge of this girl of
eighteen is very vague and uncertain. Some of Dante's commentators
believe her to have been a figment of his brain, a woman who never
lived, or an allegory of wisdom, virtue, the Church, theology, etc. But
at the death of her father Beatrice again behaves like any other earthly
maiden. There is a grain of truth in every one of these theories, for
Dante was a great scholastic as well as a great poet, and in more
advanced years he felt a need somehow to connect the love of his youth
with the system of the Church; this could be done in an allegorical way
without being inwardly untruthful.

Vague forces, which the lover himself realises as mysterious, run high
in the _Vita Nuova_ and in the poems; the lover has hallucinations in
sleep and sickness. In the third canzone Dante speaks of the
impossibility of comprehending what gave him a glimpse of the nature of
his mistress. It was a foreboding of new and great things, struggling
slowly and gradually to take shape, for the creation of a world-system,
one of whose supporting pillars was personal love of an individual, was
an unprecedented achievement. "When she speaks a spirit inclines from
heaven." The angels implore God to call this "miracle" into their midst,
but God wills that they shall have patience until the "Hope of the
Blessed" appears.

Love says of her can there be mortal thing
At once adorned so richly and so pure?
Then looks on her and silently affirms
That heaven designed in her a creature new.

(_Transl. by_ C. LYELL.)

Again and again recurs the motif of her beauty before which the world
must fall prostrate. In a sonnet not included in the _Vita Nuova_ he
says:

In heaven itself that lady had her birth,
I thin