e, the youth who watches over or
educates his mistress.

60. Next, take, though more briefly, graver testimony--that of the
great Italians and Greeks. You know well the plan of Dante's great
poem--that it is a love poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for her
watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet
saves him from destruction--saves him from hell. He is going eternally
astray in despair; she comes down from heaven to his help, and
throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting for him
the most difficult truths, divine and human, and leading him, with
rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star.

I do not insist upon Dante's conception; if I began I could not cease;
besides, you might think this a wild imagination of one poet's heart.
So I will rather read to you a few verses of the deliberate writing of
a knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly characteristic of the
feeling of all the noblest men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth
century, preserved among many other such records of knightly honor and
love, which Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from among the early
Italian poets.

"For lo! thy law is passed
That this my love should manifestly be
To serve and honor thee;
And so I do; and my delight is full,
Accepted for the servant of thy rule.

"Without almost, I am all rapturous,
Since thus my will was set
To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence;
Nor ever seems it anything could rouse
A pain or regret,
But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense;
Considering that from thee all virtues spread
As from a fountain head,--
_That in thy gift is wisdom's best avail,_
_And honor without fail;_
With whom each sovereign good dwells separate,
Fulfilling the perfection of thy state.

"Lady, since I conceived
That pleasurable aspect in my heart,
_My life has been apart_
_In shining brightness and the place of truth;_
Which till that time, good sooth,
Groped among shadows in a darken'd place,
Where many hours and days
It hardly ever had remember'd good.
But now my servitude
Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest.
A man from a wild beast
Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived."

61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have had a lower
estimate of women than this Christian lover. His spiritual subjection
to them was, indeed, not so ab