And here," I said to myself, "if
folk must needs marry--a thing I never could understand--here, as I
think, is an instance in which a man and a woman might really be happy
together, making true mates, lovers, and friends, finding life sweet to
share, and finding nothing in their union that was not noble and pure."
So I thought while my Dante was betraying his secret by repeating his
lesson without his book.

These were the words that he spoke with his eyes fixed upon the lady
Beatrice, and they live in my memory as fresh as they seemed on the day
when I first read them in Messer Guido's lodging, and the evening when I
first heard them in Messer Folco's hall. Here is what they said:

"Blessed they name the lady whom I love,
Even as the angelic lips in Paradise
At last shall bless her when she moves above
The sun and all the stars. But while mine eyes
Regard her ere she numbers the Nine Skies,
Immortal in her mortal loveliness,
Can I be scorned if to my soul of sighs
Earth's blessing seems the greater, Heaven's the less?"

Even as he came to an end in the great quiet that reigned over the
place, I saw how Dante grew of a sudden strangely pale, and how his body
swayed as if his senses were about to drown themselves in a swoon, and I
truly think that he would have fainted away and fallen to the ground in
the transport of his passion if I had not sprung forward from amid the
throng where I stood and caught him in my arms.

XIII

GO-BETWEENS

To most of those that were present in Messer Folco's house that night it
was little less than impossible to misunderstand the meaning of those
latest rhymes that Messer Dante had read. Even if none had taken into
account the agitation that had come over my friend, and which at least
identified him in spirit with the substance of what he read, if it did
not patently proclaim him the author, at least it was staringly evident
that the stanza was a public tribute to the loveliness of Madonna
Beatrice. Did not her name of Beatrice imply blessedness, and was not
blessedness, terrestrial and celestial, the intimate theme of the
octave? Further, since I speak of the octave, were not those that had
nimble judgments and sprightly memories able to recall that Madonna
Beatrice's name was made up of eight letters, and then, following on
this pathway of knowledge, to discover that the first letter of each
line of the stanza corresponded in its o