Ricciarda were banished from Pistoja by the Neri, and in their flight
they took refuge in a small fortress perched near the summit of the
Apennines, where they were joined by Cino, who had determined to share
their fortunes. There the spring turned into summer, and the summer
into autumn, and the days sped happily--days which were later called the
happiest of the poet's whole life. The two young people roamed the hills
together, or took their share in the household duties, and the whole
picture seems to breathe forth an air of reality and truth which far
removes it from that atmosphere of comic-opera love and passion which
seemed to fill the Midi. When the winter came, the hardship of this
mountain life commenced; the winds grew too keen, and the young girl
soon began to show the effects of the want and misery to which she was
exposed. Finally, the end came; and there Cino and the parents,
grieving, laid her to her rest, in a sheltered valley. The pathos of
this story needs no word of explanation, and Cino's grief is best shown
by an act of his later years. Long afterward, when he was loaded with
fame and honors, it happened that, being sent upon an embassy, he had
occasion to cross the mountains near the spot where Selvaggia had been
buried. Sending his suite around by another path, he went alone to her
tomb and tarried for a time in prayer and sorrow. Later, in verse, he
commemorates this visit, closing with the words:

"...pur chiamando, Selvaggia!
L'alpe passai, con voce di dolore."

[Then calling aloud in accents of despair, Selvaggia! I passed the
mountain tops.] Cino's loved one is distinguished in the history of
Italian literature as the _bel numer'una_--"fair number one"--in that
list of the famous women of the century where the names of Beatrice and
Laura are to be found.

With Dante, the spiritual nature of his love for Beatrice assumed an
almost mystical and religious character, betraying the marked influence
of mediaeval philosophy and theology; and here it was--for the first
time in modern literature--that woman as a symbol of goodness and light
found herself raised upon a pedestal and glorified in the eyes of the
world. Many a pink and rosy Venus had been evoked before, many a
pale-faced nun had received the veneration of the multitude for her
saintly life, but here we have neither Venus nor saint; for Beatrice is
the type of the good woman in the world, human in her instincts and holy
in her