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Allor si mosse, ed io gli tenni dietro,
 

says Dante in the closing line of this, the First Canto of the Divina Commedia.

 
Then moved he on, and I paced after him.
 

Could you have a more realistic touch? So realistic, so real is it, in the Realm of the Ideal, that, just as Dante followed Virgil, so we follow both, humble and unquestioning believers in whatever may be told us.

I am not unaware that, in an age in which the approval of inflexibly avenging justice consequent on wrongdoing is less marked and less frequent than sentimental compassion for the wrongdoer, the punishments inflicted in the Inferno for the infraction of the Divine Law, as Dante understood it, are found repellent by many persons, and agreeable to few. I grant that they are appalling in their sternness; nor was Dante himself unconscious of this, for he does describe Minos as “scowling horribly” as the souls of the damned came before him for judgment, and for discriminating consignment to their allotted circle of torture. Always terse, and therefore all the more terrible, he nevertheless exhausts the vocabulary of torment in describing the doloroso ospizio, the dolorous home from which they will never return. As Milton speaks of the “darkness visible” of Hell, so Dante, before him, writes of it as loco d’ogni luce muto, a place silent of light, but that wails and moans like a tempestuous sea, battered and buffeted by jarring winds, finally designated

 
La bufera infernal, che mai non resta.
The infernal hurricane that ceases never.
 

Of those who are whirled about by it, di qua, di là, di giù, di su, hither and thither, upward and downward, he writes the awful line:

 
Nulla speranza li conforta mai,
Non che di posa, ma di minor pena.
 
 
They have no hope of consolation ever,
Or even mitigation of their woe.
 

I could not bring myself, and I am sure you would not wish me to cite more minutely, the magnificently merciless phrases – all of them thoroughly realistic touches concerning ideal torment – wherewith Dante here makes his terza rima an instrument or organ on which to sound the very diapason of the damned; and, did he dwell overlong on those deep, distressing octaves of endless suffering, without passing by easy and natural gradations into the pathetic minor, he would end by alienating all but the austerer natures. But he is too great an artist, too human, too congenitally and rootedly a poet, to make that mistake. I am sure you all know in which canto of the Inferno occur the terrific phrases I have been citing, and need no telling that they are immediately followed by the most tender and tearful passage in the wide range of poetic literature. While even yet the sound of la bufera infernal seems howling in our ears, suddenly it all subsides, and we hear instead a musically plaintive voice saying:

 
Siede la terra, dove nata fui,
Sulla marina dove il Po discende,
Per aver pace co’ seguaci sui.
 
 
The land where I was born sits by the sea,
Unto whose shore a restless river rolls,
To be at peace with all its followers.
 

Then comes the love-story of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, told in such exquisite accents, so veiled in music, so transfigured by verse, that even the sternest moralist, I imagine, can hardly bring himself to call it illicit. I confess I think it the loveliest single passage in poetry ever written; yes, lovelier even than anything in Shakespeare, for it has all Shakespeare’s genius, and more than Shakespeare’s art; and I compassionate the man or woman who, having had the gift of birth, goes down to the grave without having read it. There is no such other love-story, no such other example of the lacrymæ rerum, the deep abiding tearfulness of things. Nothing should be taken from, nothing can be added to it. To me it seems sacred, like the Ark of the Covenant, that no one must presume to touch; and I own I tremble as I presume, here and there, to attempt, unavailingly, to translate it. It was my good fortune to be in Florence in the month of May 1865, when the City of Flowers, the City of Dante, which then seemed peopled with nightingales and roses, was celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of the birth of her exiled poet; and those of us who loved him assembled in the Pagliano Theatre to hear Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi repeat, to the accompaniment of living pictures, the best-known passages of the Divina Commedia. One of those supreme elocutionists, who still lives, recited the story of Paolo and Francesca; and from her gifted voice we heard of the tempo de’ dolci sospiri and i dubbiosi aesiri, the season of sweet sighs and hesitating desires, the disiato riso, the longed-for smile, the trembling kiss, the closing of the volume, and then the final lines of the canto:

 
Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse,
L’altro piangeva sì, che di pietade
Io venni men così com’io morisse:
E caddi, come corpo morto cade.
 
 
While the one told to us this dolorous tale,
The other wept so bitterly, that I
Out of sheer pity felt as like to die;
And down I fell, even as a dead body falls.
 

This unmatched tale of tender transgression and vainly penitential tears almost reconciles us to the more abstract description of punishment that precedes it, and the detailed account of pitiless penalty that follows it, in succeeding cantos; and the absolute fusion of the ideal and the real in the woeful story imparts to it a verisimilitude irresistible even by the most unimaginative and incredulous. Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, are names so familiar to us all that any story concerning them would have to be to the last degree improbable to move our incredulity. But who is it that is not prepared to believe in the sorrows of a love-tale?

 
Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
 

It is the greatest of all masters of the human heart, the greatest and wisest teacher concerning human life, who tells us that; and Dante, who in this respect is to be almost as much trusted as Shakespeare himself, makes Francesca, with her truly feminine temperament, say:

 
Amor, che a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
Che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
 
 
Love that compels all who are loved to love,
Entangled both in such abiding charm,
That, as you see, he still deserts me not.
 

As we hear those words, it is no longer Rimini, Ravenna, Malatesta, Paolo, Francesca, that arrest our attention and rivet it by their reality. We are enthralled by the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will, of the larger and wider world we all inhabit, of this vast and universal theatre, of whose stage Love remains to-day, as it was yesterday, and will remain for ever, the central figure, the dominant protagonist.

So far we have seen, by illustrations purposely taken from passages in the Inferno and the Purgatorio familiar to all serious readers of the Divine Comedy, how Dante, by realistic touches, makes us believe in the ideal, and how, by never for long quitting the region of the Ideal, he reconciles us to the most accurate and merciless realism. But there is a third Realm to which he is admitted, and whither he transports us, the Paradiso. Some prosaically precise person would, perhaps, say that the thirtieth canto of the Purgatorio is not a portion of the Paradiso. But you know better, for in it Beatrice appears to her poet-lover:

 
Sotto verde manto,
Vestita di color di fiamma viva,
 
 
In mantle green, and girt with living light,
 

while angelic messengers and ministers from Heaven round her scatter lilies that never fade; and when Dante, overcome by the celestial vision, turns to Virgil with the same instinctive feeling of trust

 
Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma,
Quando ha paura
 

– trust such as is shown by a little child hurrying to its mother when afraid, and exclaims, translating a line of Virgil’s own:

 
Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma,
 
 
O how I know, and feel, and recognise
The indications of my youthful love; —
 

he finds that Virgil, dolcissimo padre, his gentle parent and guide, has left him, and he stands alone in the presence of Beatrice, and hears her voice saying:

 
Non pianger anco, non pianger ancora;
Chè pianger ti convien per altra spada.
 
 
Weep not as yet, Dante, weep not as yet,
Though weep you shortly shall, and for good cause.
 

Tearless, and with downcast eyes, he listens to her just reproaches, trying not even to see the reflection of himself in the water of the translucent fountain at his side: —

 
Tanta vergogna mi gravò la fronte.
So strong the shame that weighed my forehead down.
 

And so he turns aside his glance to the untransparent sward, till comes the line, awful in its reproving simplicity:

 
Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice!
Look at me well! Yes, I am Beatrice!
 

Then full and fast flow the tears, like melting snows of Apennine under Slavonian blast.

But there is yet worse to come, yet harder to bear, when, not even addressing him, but turning from him to her heavenly escort, she speaks of him as “Questi,” “this man,” and tells them, in his hearing, how much his love for her might have done for him, had he still lived the vita nuova, the pure fresh life with which love had inspired him while she was yet on earth. But when she was withdrawn from him to Heaven, when she was of flesh disrobed and became pure spirit, and so was more deserving of love than before.

 
Questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.
 
 
This man from me withdrew himself, and gave
Himself to others.
 

What think you of that as a realistic treatment of the Ideal? If there be any among my audience, members of the sex commonly supposed to be the wiser, who but partly feel and imperfectly apprehend it, then let them ask any woman they will what she thinks of it, and she will answer, “It is supreme, it is unapproachable.”

After such an illustration of the power of Dante over one of the main secrets of fascination in great poetry, it is unnecessary to go in search of more. With illustrating my theme of this evening I have done, and it only remains to add a few words of repetition and enforcement of what has been already indicated, lest perchance, if they were omitted, my meaning and purpose should be misapprehended or overlooked. Did you happen to observe that, a little while back, I used the phrase, “the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will”? But now, before concluding, let me say, what has been in my mind all along, and has been there for many years, that great poetry consists of the combination of ideal Realism, realistic Idealism, and Idealism pure and simple. Upon that point much might be said, and perhaps some day I may venture to say it. In all ages the disposition of the more prosaic minds – by which term I do not mean minds belonging to persons devoid of feeling, or even of sentiment, but persons destitute of the poetic sense, or of what Poetry essentially is – has been to incline, in works of fiction whether in prose or verse, to Realism pure and simple; and the present Age, thanks to the invention of photography and the dissemination of novels that seek to describe persons and things such as they are or are supposed to be, has a peculiar and exceptional leaning in that direction. The direction is a dangerous one, for the last stage of Realism pure and simple in prose fiction is the exhibition of demoralised man and degraded woman. In poetry, thank Heaven, that operation is impossible. No doubt, it is possible in verse just as it is possible in prose, and perhaps even more so; and there are persons who will tell you that it is Poetry. But it is not, and never can be made such. Poetry is either the idealised Real, the realistic Ideal, or the Ideal pure and simple. In other words, as I long since endeavoured to show, Poetry is Transfiguration. Attempts are made in these days, as we all well know, to get you to accept Realism pure and simple as the newest and most inspired utterance of the Heavenly Maid. But they will not be successful. In that great hall of the Vatican, whither throng pilgrims from every quarter of the world, and to whose walls Raphael has bequeathed the ripest and richest fruits of his lucid, elevated, and elevating genius, is a presentation of the Muse. She is seated on a throne of majestic marble. Her feet are planted on the clouds, but her laurelled head and outstretched wings are high in the Empyrean, and round her maiden throat is a circlet enamelled with the unageing stars. With one hand she cherishes the lyre, with the other she grasps the Book of Wisdom; and her attendants are, not the sycophants of passing popularity, but the eternal angels of God, upholding a scroll wherein are inscribed the words Numine afflatur. She sings only when inspired. That is the Muse for me. Surely it is the Muse for you. At any rate, it was the Muse of Dante; the Muse that inspired the Divina Commedia through his love for Beatrice. As an old English song has it, “’Tis love that makes the world go round,” a homely truth that Dante idealised and transfigured in the last line of his immortal poem:

 
L’Amor che muove il Sole e l’altre stelle.
 
 
Love,
That lights the sun and makes the planets sing;
 

love of Love, love of Beauty, love of Virtue, love of Country, love of Mankind; or, as one might put it in this age of physical discovery:

 
Electric love illuminates the world.
 

DANTE’S POETIC CONCEPTION OF WOMAN

The imaginative estimate or ideal conception of Woman by the Poets has always been deemed exceptionally interesting, especially by women themselves, for, as a rule, it is agreeable; and, even if the presentation be sometimes a little overcharged with glowing colour, all of us, men and women alike, are not otherwise than pleased with descriptions that portray us, not exactly as we are, but as we should like to be. Withal, a portrait, to obtain recognition, must have in it some resemblance to the original; and, speaking in the most prosaic manner, one need not hesitate to affirm that any representation of women, at least of womanly women, that was not attractive would be a travesty of the fact.

Alike in the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia, Beatrice Portinari figures so largely, and Dante’s love for her from childhood in her tenth till her death in her twenty-sixth year is so striking that most persons think of the great Florentine Poet in association with no other women, their characters, their occupations, temptations, weaknesses, virtues, and everyday duties. Yet no man could be a Poet such as Dante who confined his ken to so limited a field of observation and feeling, and to whom the whole range of feminine emotion and action was not familiar; and, in the exposition of that theme, I would invite attention to that wider range and scope of interest, though from it Beatrice will not be forgotten. Let us turn, first of all, to the fifteenth canto of the Paradiso, where Cacciaguida, the Poet’s ancestor, describes, while Beatrice looks on with assenting smile, the simplicity of Florentine manners in former times, alike in men and women, but in women especially – times dear to Dante, since they immediately preceded those in which he himself lived.

 
Fiorenza,
 

says Cacciaguida, calling the city by its original name,

 
Fiorenza, dentro della cerchia antica,
Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.
Non avea catenella, non corona,
Non donne contigiate, non cintura,
Che fosse a veder più che la persona.
 
 
Florence, within her ancient boundaries
Was chaste, and sober, and in peace abode.
No golden bracelets and no head-tires then,
Transparent garments, rich embroideries,
That caught the eye more than the wearer’s self.
 

He goes on to say that the Florentine ladies of that day left their mirror without any artificial colouring on their cheeks. Mothers themselves tended the cradle, and maidens and matrons drew off the thread from the distaff, while listening to old tales of Troy, Fiesole, and Rome. It is Dante’s own description of the manners and customs of the days when he was a child.

Some, perhaps, will ask, “Surely there is nothing very poetic in the foregoing description of woman?” If so, one must reply, indeed there is, and only the acceptance of the idea of Poetry prevailing amongst us of late years, which is essentially false, because so narrow and so exclusive of the simplest poetry at one end of the scale, and of the highest poetry at the other, could make any one doubt that a really poetic and imaginative conception of woman must include the dedication, though not the entire dedication, of herself to domestic duty and tenderness.

Is there nothing poetic in Wordsworth’s picture of a girl turning her wheel beside an English fire?

Is there nothing poetic in Byron’s description? —

 
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose hopes are innocent.
 

Or in Coventry Patmore’s? —

 
So wise in all she ought to know,
So ignorant in all beside.
 

Is there, I venture to ask, nothing poetic, nothing romantic in the description of a young girl who blends with cultivated sensibility to Literature and Art homely tasks thus described? —

 
… She brims the pail,
Straining the udders with her dainty palms,
Sweet as the milk they drain. She skims the cream,
And, with her sleeves rolled up and round white arms,
Makes the churn sing like boulder-baffled stream.
A wimple on her head, and kirtled short,
She hangs the snow-white linen in the wind,
A heavenly earthliness.
 

In the whole range of poetic literature there is no more celebrated passage than the essentially domestic picture, in the Sixth Book of the Iliad, of Hector, Andromache, and their baby boy, where the Trojan hero, before sallying forth to battle afresh, stretches out his arms to clasp the little Astyanax. It might be pedantic to recite the passage in the original. But here is an excellent translation of it by Mr. Walter Leaf:

So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But the child shrank back to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse, dismayed at his dear father’s aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet’s top. Then his dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled him in his arms.

Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident, founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman. Only in an age sicklied o’er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality could it be otherwise.

But a poet’s ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect, Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most – indeed, nearly all – of the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater, had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part, also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among those whom

 
Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.
 

She has not even hope to fall back on as a mitigation of her endless torments. Of her offences against his ideal of woman he says:

 
A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta,
Che libito fe lecito in sua legge,
Per torre il biasmo in che era condotta.
 

She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her. He is a little hard and unjust to Dido, whom Virgil treats with such exquisite tenderness, in naming her along with “lustful Cleopatra” in the same passage. To Helen he is more indulgent, in words at least, content with saying that she was the guilty cause of dire events, “per cui tanto reo tempo si volse”; but she does not escape endless expiation. Some of my readers will remember how much more damning of her conduct is Virgil in the Sixth Book of the Æneid, where Priam represents her as giving the signal to the Greeks to enter Troy, and having concealed his sword, that he may fall a helpless victim to the vengeance of Paris, whom the fair wanton wished to propitiate in the hour of her lord’s triumph.

But what is Dante’s attitude towards Francesca da Rimini, in the most beautiful passage, it seems to me, in the whole range of narrative Poetry? Many, I am sure, know it by heart, and have thereby fortified themselves against the modern less-refined treatment of it even by men aspiring to be regarded as poets. Often as one has repeated it to oneself, one has never felt that Dante had for Francesca any harsher feeling than sympathetic compassion. He casts around her the halo of the purest sentiment; he brings music of matchless verbal sweetness to the description of the hour, the place, the circumstances of her disinterested and unselfish surrender. The very lines in which he leads up to her pathetic story, lines in which his feeling concerning frail and hapless love seems to be purposely expressed in general and wide-embracing language, are in themselves significant to those who observe their meaning. He says that when he heard Virgil name the numerous knights and fair dames who were suffering from having subordinated prudence to impulse, he only felt troubled for them and bewildered.

 
Pietà mi vinse, e fu quasi smarrito.
 

The first thing he notices in Francesca and her lover is their buoyancy in the air, as though they were the finest and most tenuous of spirits; and when he says to Virgil that he would fain have speech with them, the reply is that he has only to appeal to them by the love that still moves them, and they will draw nigh to him. Then follows that lovely simile of doves floating to call, and Francesca’s recognition of Dante with the words:

 
O animal grazioso e benigno!
 

who is sure to have pity on her hapless doom. When Francesca pauses in her narrative, and Dante bows his head for sorrow, Virgil shows what is his own feeling by the brief question addressed to Dante, “What think you?” Dante replies in a voice broken by emotion:

 
… O lasso,
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio
Menò costoro al doloroso passo!
 

and, turning to Francesca, he says that her fate fills his eyes with tears and his heart with anguish. Encouraged by the poet’s sympathy, she tells him what happened, “al tempo de’ dolci sospiri,” in the season of sweet sighs, in itself a preliminary and melodious appeal for indulgence, and that he must be patient with her if she tells her tale, sobbing as she speaks. Torn between sweet remembrance and regret, she cannot refrain from recalling

 
… il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,
 

or intimating with supreme delicacy what ensued in the final line of her narrative:

 
Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
 

The story she had been reading with Paolo Malatesta of Lancelot and Guinevere fell from their hands, and that day they read no further on. And Dante? All he says is that he felt like to die for grief, and fell to the ground even as a dead body falls. From the first line to the last he utters no word of blame or reproach. He would not have been a poet had he done so.

Let us now turn from the fifth book of the Inferno to the third of the Paradiso, that we may add to our knowledge of Dante’s poetic conception of Woman. He there beholds Piccarda Donati, whom he had known in her lifetime on earth, but at first does not recognise, because, as she herself says with heavenly humility, she is now much fairer to look on than she was then. Withal, she adds, she occupies only an inferior place in Heaven, because she was forced, and sorely against her own will, to violate her vow of virginity. She begins her story by saying simply:

 
Io fui nel mondo vergine sorella,
 

that she was a nun dedicated to God, and goes on to tell how she was violently torn from her cloister by her brother, Forese Donati, and his accomplices, to further family ambition, and compelled to submit to the marriage rite. Dante, feeling, as it seems to me, that this did not detract from her merit, asks her if she is contented with the relatively inferior position in Paradise she says she is assigned among celestial denizens. I trust many readers know her reply, for it is one of the noblest and most beautiful passages in the whole of the Divina Commedia. Like all fine passages in Poetry, adequate rendering of it in another tongue is not attainable. But the best translation of it with which I am acquainted is that of C. B. Cayley – no Cary, mark you – in terza rima, and of which I remember I availed myself when, many years ago, I was beginning to learn Italian, and read Dante for the first time among the then leafy-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Here is Piccarda’s reply:

 
Our will, O brother mine, is kept at rest
By power of heavenly love, which makes us will,
For nought else thirsting, only things possessed.
If we should crave to be exalted still
More highly, then our will would not agree
With His, who gives to us the place we fill.
For ’tis of our own will the very ground,
That in the will of God we govern ours.
 

Then comes that supremely beautiful line, not to be surpassed by any line even in Dante:

 
In la sua voluntade è nostra pace.
Our peace is in submission to His will.
 

Is it fanciful to think that in that line also Dante has betrayed and bequeathed to us, perhaps unconsciously, his main conception of Woman, as a gentle and adoring creature, who finds her greatest happiness in subordinating her will to those who are deserving of the trust she reposes in them?

But Piccarda does not end the dialogue with her own story. She tells Dante that the great Costanza, as she calls her, who married the German Henry the Fifth, was also torn from a convent where she had taken the veil, and forced into Royal nuptials. But when she was thus compelled to violate her vows,

 
Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,
Non fu dal vel del cuor giammai disciolta.
 
 
She wore the vestal’s veil within her heart.
 

And, as if to indicate that the conduct of each was condoned by the Virgin of Virgins, Dante concludes by saying:

 
… Ave
Maria, cantando; e cantando vanio,
 
 
She faded from our sight, singing Ave Maria,
 

and once again he concentrated his gaze on Beatrice, Beatrice whom he regarded as his highest poetic conception of Woman. Fully to grasp what that was, we must descend from Heaven to earth and recall the origin and growth of his adoration of her, as described in the Vita Nuova.

To some commentators on Dante, the narrative to be read there has suggested difficulties when, in reality, there are none, leading them to urge that a child of nine years of age could not feel what is therein described, and that, therefore, it is purely symbolic, and was written not about any human creature, but indicated Philosophy, or the desire for spiritual enlightenment and the search for heavenly wisdom, which was Dante’s overpowering impulse almost from the cradle. The answer to such an interpretation of the passage is that it betrays an utter ignorance of the emotional precocity of the poetic temperament, and of the vague but intense hold Love can acquire over Poets from their earliest years.

Of the reality underlying the idealism of the Vita Nuova, we therefore need have no doubt whatever. Dante’s Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine maid first, a Florentine bride later, whose people lived in the Corso, near the Canto de’ Pazzi.

All that follows in the narrative of the Vita Nuova may be relied on just as implicitly; how, when she was eighteen years of age, he met her again walking in the streets of Florence between two noble ladies older than herself, and graciously, as Dante says, returned his salute; how, with the naïf shyness of a youth consumed with love, he tried to dissemble it by pretending to be enamoured of another damsel, which only made Beatrice look away when she met him; and how he contrived to convey to her indirectly, through a poem he wrote, that she had misjudged him; how, thereon, she looked on him graciously once more; and how, alas! in her twenty-fifth year, she was summoned from this world to the world above. Then the Vita Nuova draws mournfully to a close, ending with these significant words: —

After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.

For the fulfilment of that determination we must return to the Divina Commedia, written in the fullness of the Poet’s powers. But there are three lines in the Vita Nuova about the death of Beatrice that have haunted me ever since I first read them, and whose beauty, I am sure, all will feel:

 
Non la ci tolse qualità di gelo,
Nè di color, siccome l’altro fece,
Ma sola fu sua gran benignitade:
 

lines very difficult to translate, but the meaning of which is that she died neither from chill nor from fever, which carries off other mortals, but only of her great benignness, or excess of goodness, which rendered earth an unfitting dwelling-place for her, and Paradise her only true home.