litics went well in Pistoja for the moment. But who could tell?
The next turn of the wheel might bring the Pope round; Pistoja might go
Black (as indeed she did in more senses than one), and pray where would
be his Assessorship of Civil Causes, where his solemn chair, where his
title to doffing of caps and a chief seat at feasts? Cino, meditating
these things over his morning sop and wine, rubbed his chin sore and
determined to take a wife. His family was respectable, but Ghibelline;
his means were happy; his abilities known to others as well as to
himself. Good! He would marry a sober Guelphish virgin, and establish a
position to face both the windy quarters. It was when his negotiations
to this end had reached maturity, when the contract for his espousals
with the honourable lady, Monna Margherita degli Ughi, had actually been
signed, that Messer Cino of Pistoja was late for his class, got cold
feet, and turned poet.

II

It was a strange hour when Love leaped the heart of Cino, that staid
jurisconsult, to send him reeling up the sunny side of the piazza
heedless of his friends or his enemies. To his dying day he could not
have told you how it came upon him. Being a man of slow utterance and of
a mind necessarily bent towards the concrete, all he could confess to
himself throughout the terrible business was, that there had been a
cataclysm. He remembered the coldness of his feet; cold feet in mid
April--something like a cataclysm! As he turned it over and over in his
mind a lady recurred with the persistence of a refrain in a ballad; and
words, quite unaccustomed words, tripped over his tongue to meet her.
What a lovely vision she had made!--"Una donzella non con uman' volto (a
gentle lady not of human look)." Well, what next? Ah, something about
"Amor, che ha la mia virtu tolto (Love that has reft me of my manly
will)." Then should come _amore_, and of course _cuore_, and _disio_,
and _anch' io_! This was very new; it was also very strange what a
fascination he found in his phrenetic exercises. Rhyme, now: he had
called it often enough a jingle of endings; it were more true to say
that it was a jingle of mendings, for it certainly soothed him. He was
making a goddess in his own image; poetry--Santa Cecilia! he was a
poet, like his friend Dante, like that supercilious young tomb-walker
Guido Cavalcanti. A poet he undoubtedly became; and if his feet were
cold his heart was on fire.

What happened was this, s