old
me, they had been there now some time before I perceived them. When I
saw them, I rose, and, saluting them, said, 'Another was just now with
me, and on that account I was in thought.' When these persons had gone,
I returned to my work, that is, to drawing figures of Angels; and while
doing this, a thought came to me of saying words in rhyme, as for an
anniversary poem for her, and of addressing them to those who had come
to me. Then I said this sonnet, which has two beginnings:--

FIRST BEGINNING.

"Unto my mind remembering had come
The gentle lady, with such pure worth graced,
That by the Lord Most High she had been placed
Within the heaven of peace, where Mary hath her home."

SECOND BEGINNING.

"Unto my mind had come, indeed, in thought,
That gentle one for whom Love's tears are shed,
Just at the time when, by his power led,
To see what I was doing you were brought.

"Love, who within my mind did her perceive,
Was roused awake within my wasted heart,
And said unto my sighs, 'Go forth! depart!'
Whereon each one in grief did take its leave.

"Lamenting they from out my breast did go,
And uttering a voice that often led
The grievous tears unto my saddened eyes.

"But those which issued with the greatest woe,
'O noble soul,' they in departing said,
'To-day makes up the year since thou to heaven didst rise.'"

The preceding passage is one of the many in the "Vita Nuova" which are
of peculiar interest, as illustrating the personal tastes of Dante, and
the common modes of his life. "I was drawing," he says, "the figure of
an Angel"; and this statement is the more noticeable, because Giotto,
the man who set painting on its modern course, was not yet old enough
to have exercised any influence upon Dante.[J] The friendship which
afterwards existed between them had its beginning at a later period. At
this time Cimabue still held the field. He often painted angels around
the figures of the Virgin and her Child; and in his most famous picture,
in the Church of Sta. Maria Novella, there are certain angels of which
Vasari says, with truth, that, though painted in the Greek manner, they
show an approach toward the modern style of drawing. These angels may
well have seemed beautiful to eyes accustomed to the hard unnaturalness
of earlier works. The love of Art pervaded Florence, and a nature so
sensitive and so sympathetic as Dante's could not but part