read when Florence banished the greatest
of her sons. The mask is as full as the portrait of intellect and
feeling, of strength and character, but it lacks something of the early
sweetness and sensibility. Rossetti's portraiture retains the salient
qualities of both portrait and mask. It represents Dante in his
twenty-seventh year; the face gives hint of both poet and soldier, for
behind clear-cut features capable of strengthening into resolve and
rigour lie whole depths of tenderest sympathy. The abstracted air,
the self-centred look, the eyes that seem to see only what the
mind conceives and casts forward from itself; the slow, uncertain,
half-reluctant gait,--these are profoundly true to the man and the
dream.

Of Beatrice, no such description is given either in the _Vita Nuova_ or
the _Commedia_ as could afford an artist a definite suggestion. Dante's
love was an idealised passion; it concerned itself with spiritual
beauty, whereof the emotions excited absorbed every merely physical
consideration. The beauty of Beatrice in the _Vita Nuova_ is like a
ray of sunshine flooding a landscape--we see it only in the effect it
produces. All we know with certainty is that her hair was light, that
her face was pale, and that her smile was one of thoughtful sweetness.
These hints of a beautiful person Rossetti has wrought into a creation
of such purity that, lovely as she is in death, as in life, we think
less of her loveliness than of her loveableness.

The personage of Love, who plays throughout the _Vita Nuova_ a mystical
part is not the Pagan Love, but a youth and Christian Master, as Dante
terms him, sometimes of severe and terrible aspect. He is represented in
the picture as clad in a flame-coloured garment (for it is in a mist
of the colour of fire that he appears to the lover), and he wears the
pilgrim's scallop-shell on his shoulder as emblem of that pilgrimage on
earth which Love is.

The chamber wherein the body of Beatrice has its abiding-place is, to
Dante's imaginings, a chamber of dreams. Visionary as the mind of the
dreamer, it discloses at once all that goes forward within its own
narrow compass, together with the desolate streets of the city of
Florence, which, to his fancy, sits silent for his loss, and the long
flight of angels above that bear away the little cloud, to which is
given a vague semblance of the beatified Beatrice. As if just fallen
back in sleep, the beautiful lady lies in death, her hands f