_Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, As birds within the green shade of the grove. Before the gentle heart, in Nature’s scheme, Love was not, or the gentle heart ere Love. For with the sun, at once, So sprang the light immediately, nor was Its birth before the sun’s. And Love hath his effect in gentleness Of very self; even as Within the middle fire the heat’s excess._ --ROSSETTI. Much might be said of many other precursors of Dante, but space admonishes us to restrict ourselves to two--Guido delle Colonne, a Sicilian, chiefly known for his Latin romance on the Fall of Troy, but also a vernacular lyrist of considerable merit; and Rustico di Filippo (1200-1274), eulogised by Brunetto Latini as a man of great worth, but whose place among poets is mainly that of a satirist. Very biting are his lines on a certain Messer Ugolino, a member by anticipation of what Carlyle called “the Heaven and Hell Amalgamation Society,” “who has good thoughts, no doubt, if they would stay,” and _Would love his party with a dear accord If only he could once quite care for it._ One other writer among Dante’s predecessors may be mentioned, not for his claims as a poet, but as a man so illustrious that he honoured poetry even by attempting what he was unqualified to perform. He is no less a man than St. Francis of Assisi, whose _Song of the Creatures_ is pronounced by Renan “the most perfect expression given by the modern world of its feeling for religion.”