y that the boy, young as he was, is said
to have then conceived so deep a passion for the child that maturer
attachments proved powerless to efface it. Such was the origin of a love
that grew from childlike tenderness to manly ardour, and, surviving all
the buffetings of an untoward fate, is known to us now and for all
time in a record of so much reality and purity, as seems to every
right-hearted nature to be equally the story of his personal attachment
as the history of a passion that in Florence, six centuries ago, for its
mortal put on immortality.

The Portinari and Alighieri were immediate neighbours, yet it does not
appear that the young Dante encountered the lady in any marked way until
nine years later, and then, in the first bloom of a gracious womanhood,
she is described as affording him in the street a salutation of such
unspeakable courtesy that he left the place where for the instant he had
stood sorely abashed, as one intoxicated with a love that now at first
knew itself for what it was. The incidents of the attachment are few in
facts; numerous only in emotions, and therein too uncertain and liable
to change to be counted. In order not to disclose a passion, which other
reasons than those given by the poet may have tempted him to conceal,
Dante affects an attachment to another lady of the city, and the
rumour of this brings about an estrangement with the real object of his
desires, which reduces the poet to such an abject condition of mind, as
finally results in his laying aside all counterfeiting. Portinari, the
father, now dies, and witnessing the tenderness with which the beautiful
Beatrice mourns him, Dante becomes affected with a painful infirmity,
wherein his mind broods over his enfeebled body, and, perceiving how
frail a thing life is, even though health keep with it, his brain begins
to travail in many imaginings, and he says within himself, "Certainly
it must some time come to pass that the very gentle Beatrice will die."
Feeling bewildered, he closes his eyes, and, in a trance, he conceives
that a friend comes to him, and says, "Hast thou not heard? She that
was thine excellent lady has been taken out of life." Then as he looks
towards Heaven in imagination, he beholds a multitude of angels who are
returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and
these angels are singing, and the words of their song are, "Osanna in
excelsis." So strong is his imagining, that it seems to him