to be a writer of verses, but to be a master of learning.
Boccaccio describes Guido Cavalcanti as "one of the best logicians in
the world, and as a most excellent natural philosopher,"[10] but says
nothing of his poetry. Dante, more than any other man of his time,
resumed in himself the general zeal for knowledge. His genius had two
distinct, and yet often intermingling parts,--the poetic and the
scientific. No learning came amiss to him. He was born a scholar, as he
was born a poet,--and had he written not a single poem, he would still
be famous as the most profound student of his times. Far as he
surpassed his contemporaries in poetry, he was no less their superior
in the depth and the extent of his knowledge. And this double nature of
his genius is plainly shown in many parts of "The New Life." A youthful
incapacity to mark clearly the line between the work of the student and
the work of the poet is manifest in it. The display of his acquisitions
is curiously mingled with the narrative of his emotions. This is not to
be charged against him as pedantry. His love of learning partook of the
nature of passion; his judgment was not yet able, if indeed it ever
became able, to establish the division between the abstractions of the
intellect and the affections of the heart. And above all, his early
claim of honor as a poet was to be justified by his possession of the
fruits of study.

But there was also in Dante a quality of mind which led him to unite
the results of knowledge with poetry in a manner almost peculiar to
himself. He was essentially a mystic. The dark and hidden side of
things was not less present to his imagination than the visible and
plain. The range of human capacity in the comprehension of the
spiritual world was not then marked by as numerous boundary-stones of
failure as now limit the way. Impossibilities were sought for with the
same confident hope as realities. The alchemists and the astrologers
believed in the attainment of results as tangible and real as those
which travellers brought back from the marvellous and still unachieved
East. The mystical properties of numbers, the influence of the stars,
the powers of cordials and elixirs, the virtues of precious stones,
were received as established facts, and opened long vistas of discovery
before the student's eyes. Curiosity and speculative inquiry were
stimulated by wonder and fed by all the suggestions of heated fancies.
Dante, partaking to the full i