“To the gentle heart doth Love ever repair,” the first great Italian lyric of this _dolce stil nuovo_, set forth an ideal creed of love which Dante made his own, and is the most fitting introduction to the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Rime_. Love has its proper dwelling in the gentle heart, as light in the sun, for Nature created them simultaneously for each other, and they cannot exist apart. “The fire of Love is caught in gentle heart as virtue in the precious stone, to which no power descends from the star before the sun makes it a gentle thing. After the sun has drawn forth from it all which there is vile, the star gives it power. So the heart which is made by Nature true, pure, and noble, a woman like a star enamours.” But a base nature will extinguish love as water does fire. Unless a man has true gentlehood in his soul, no high birth or ancient lineage will ennoble him. Even as God fills the celestial intelligence with the Beatific Vision of His Essence, so the _bella donna_ inspires him of gentle heart with the perfection of faithful love. Nor need the poet fear to take divine things as similitudes of his love, for such love as this is celestial, and will be accepted in Paradise: My lady, God shall ask, “What daredst thou?” (When my soul stands with all her acts reviewed) “Thou passedst Heaven, into My sight, as now, To make Me of vain love similitude. To Me doth praise belong, And to the Queen of all the realm of grace Who slayeth fraud and wrong.” Then may I plead: “As though from Thee he came, Love wore an angel’s face: Lord, if I loved her, count it not my shame.” ROSSETTI’S _Translation_. The poetry of the _dolce stil nuovo_ developed the spiritual conception of love already in germ in the later troubadours, and added an infusion of the new scholastic philosophy, but the real novelty lay in the superiority of Guido Guinizelli as a poet over his predecessors. From Bologna the pre-eminence passed to Florence with Guido Cavalcanti, who took from the other Guido “la gloria de la lingua” (_Purg._ xi. 98), and developed a complicated poetical psychology which culminates in his famous canzone on the nature of love: Donna me prega, perch’io voglio dire; “A lady prays me, therefore I would tell of an accident which is often fierce and is so lofty that it is called Love.” The _Vita Nuova_, beginning under the influence of Cavalcanti, becomes the supreme development in prose and verse of the doctrine of Guinizelli.