riefs; he is filled with the
passion of universal knowledge, and the desire to communicate it.
Philosophy has become the lady of his soul--to write allegorical poems
in her honor, and to comment on them with all the apparatus of his
learning in prose, his mode of celebrating her. Further, he marries; it
is said, not happily. The antiquaries, too, have disturbed romance by
discovering that Beatrice also was married some years before her death.
He appears, as time goes on, as a burgher of Florence, the father of a
family, a politician, an envoy, a magistrate, a partisan, taking his
full share in the quarrels of the day.

Beatrice reappears--shadowy, melting at times into symbol and
figure--but far too living and real, addressed with too intense and
natural feeling, to be the mere personification of anything. The lady of
the philosophical Canzoni has vanished. The student's dream has been
broken, as the boy's had been; and the earnestness of the man,
enlightened by sorrow, overleaping the student's formalities and
abstractions, reverted in sympathy to the earnestness of the boy, and
brooded once more on that saint in paradise, whose presence and memory
had once been so soothing, and who now seemed a real link between him
and that stable country "where the angels are in peace." Round her
image, the reflection of purity and truth and forbearing love, was
grouped that confused scene of trouble and effort, of failure and
success, which the poet saw round him; round her image it arranged
itself in awful order--and that image, not a metaphysical abstraction,
but the living memory, freshened by sorrow, and seen through the
softening and hallowing vista of years, of Beatrice Portinari--no
figment of imagination, but God's creature and servant. A childish love,
dissipated by heavy sorrow--a boyish resolution, made in a moment of
feeling, interrupted, though it would be hazardous to say, in Dante's
case, laid aside, for apparently more manly studies, gave the idea and
suggested the form of the "sacred poem of earth and heaven."

And the occasion of this startling unfolding of the poetic gift, of this
passage of a soft and dreamy boy into the keenest, boldest, sternest of
poets, the free and mighty leader of European song, was, what is not
ordinarily held to be a source of poetical inspiration--the political
life. The boy had sensibility, high aspirations, and a versatile and
passionate nature; the student added to this energy, vari