“This glorious poet,” writes Boccaccio, “first, when still weeping for the death of his Beatrice, about in his twenty-sixth year put together in a little volume, which he called the _New Life_, certain small works, as sonnets and canzoni, made by him in diverse times before and in rhyme, marvellously beautiful; writing at the head of each, severally and in order, the occasions which had moved him to make them, and adding at the end the divisions of each poem. And although, in maturer years, he was much ashamed of having made this little book, nevertheless, when his age is considered, it is very beautiful and pleasing, and especially to the general reader.” But this spotless lily of books is too delicate a flower in the garden of art to be plucked by the hands of the writer of the _Decameron_. A greater poet than Boccaccio has said of it: “Throughout the _Vita Nuova_ there is a strain like the first falling murmur which reaches the ear in some remote meadow, and prepares us to look upon the sea.” It is a preparation for the _Commedia_, inasmuch as it tells us how the divine singer became a poet, and how she crossed his path who was to be his spiritual pilot over that mighty ocean. Boccaccio’s statement, that Dante in maturer years was ashamed of having written this book, is perhaps due to a misunderstanding or confused recollection of a passage about certain canzoni in the _Convivio_ (i. 2). In the _Convivio_, where he discusses the nature of allegory and interprets the whole of certain later poems in an allegorical sense, Dante suggests no such significance for Beatrice in the _Vita Nuova_; but, while declaring that the _Vita Nuova_ was written at the entrance of manhood, he seems to contrast it with his more mature work, to which alone he would apply an allegorical interpretation. And he is most emphatic that this is in no way to derogate from the _Vita Nuova_ (_Conv._ i. 1): “For it is fitting to speak and act differently in one age than in another.”