The _Vita Nuova_ is the most spiritual and ethereal romance of love that exists, but its purity is such as comes, not from innocent simplicity of soul, but from self-repression. In the form of a collection of lyrics connected together by a prose narrative (itself a thing of rare and peculiar beauty), with quaint and curious scholastic divisions and explanations, Dante tells the tale of his love for Beatrice, from his first sight of her in their ninth year to a vision which is the anticipation of her final apotheosis. Although conforming with the poetic conventions of the age, especially in the earlier portions, it is based upon a real love story, however deeply tinged with mysticism and embellished with visionary episodes. The heroine in her loveliness and purity becomes an image upon earth of the Divine Beauty and Goodness; the poet’s love for her is the stepping-stone to love of the Supreme Good. Dante has learned his lesson from Guido Guinizelli, and does not fear to take God Himself as a similitude of his love; Heaven itself requires his lady for its perfection of beatitude (_V. N._ xix.); she has her precursor in Monna Giovanna, even as St. John came before the True Light (xxiv.); nay, she is a very miracle whose only root is the Blessed Trinity (xxx.). Here beginneth the “New Life,” _Incipit vita nova!_ We shall probably do well in taking the New Life not as merely meaning the poet’s youth, but as referring to the new life that began with the dawn of love, the regeneration of the soul. Dante’s first meeting with Beatrice at the beginning of her ninth and at the end of his ninth year, when she appeared to him robed in crimson, the colour of love and charity--and her “most sweet salutation” nine years later, when she came dressed all in pure white, the hue of Faith and Purity, between two gentle ladies older than herself--these things may have a certain analogy with the representation of his moral and political conversion, in the vision of the _Commedia_, as happening in his thirty-fifth year, 1300, the year of Jubilee. We may perhaps surmise that Dante, looking back from this second meeting, from which his love really dates, artistically worked up the recollections of his childhood to correspond with it; just as many years later, when he turned to the composition of the sacred poem, he looked back in his memory to some great spiritual experience when “in the middle of the journey of our life.” And, although Dante’s own words in the _Convivio_ seem absolutely to preclude any possibility of allegorising the figure of Beatrice herself, it is clear that many of the minor episodes in the _Vita Nuova_ must be regarded as symbolical.