ny single man or woman of them all, if individually
addressed, would as lief any other than Dante should take up the task. I
thought I caught a glimpse of my masked youth in another part of the
crowd prompting the demand. So Messer Guido, as herald of the general
wish, smilingly refused to take back the paper parchment, and Dante,
ever too wise to be stubborn for stubbornness' sake, surrendered, where
to persist in refusal would have seemed churlish to his host and to his
company.

"Since you honor me so far," he said, with the wistful smile of one who
feels that chance has penned him in a corner, "I must needs obey." And
with the word he began to unroll the parchment carefully. As he did so
something moved me to look round, and I saw that Madonna Beatrice had
entered the great hall and had come to a halt, observing that something
unusual was toward.

Madonna Beatrice stood arrested there among her maidens, pale and fair,
as an angel might stand, ranged about by radiant mortality. I never
could find then, and I never shall find, though I have tried often
enough, Lord knows, the exact word or exact sequence of words that
should fittingly convey the effect of her beauty, even upon those who
having seen it often seemed on each occasion to behold it for the first
time. Of her, as of every beauty that has graced the world since Helen
set fire to Troy, and Semiramis sent dead lovers adrift down the river
of Assyria, and Cleopatra charmed Caesar and Antony and Heaven knows who
besides, it might be said that she had the familiar features of
womankind; but what it was that made those features so marvellous, ah!
there was the task for a greater poet than I to take upon his shoulders.
Even the great poet that loved her--and I keep his love-book on my shelf
to this hour, wedged in between a regiment of the Fathers--even Dante
has told us nothing that shall serve to make the ages yet to come
understand what the woman was like that a man could love with so
rapturous a madness of passion. Sometimes I have thought, in my gropings
after the phrase to express her, that the word "luminous" was, perhaps,
of all single words, the word that seemed to hold shut in its casket the
most of the meaning that I sought to convey. There seemed to be about
her, even to me that was never her lover, a radiancy, a nimbus, as it
were, of celestial light that gave to pulsing flesh and running blood
and circumambient skin a quality that was, as it were, fl