“Beagles questing and huntsmen urging on,” reveals the poet taking part in sport and appreciating a jape at his own expense. A number of correspondence sonnets belong to this epoch, a small series addressed to Dante da Maiano (of which no MS. has been preserved) being probably earlier than the first sonnet of the _Vita Nuova_. A note of pure romance is struck in the charming sonnet to Guido Cavalcanti, in which the younger poet wishes that they two, with Lapo Gianni and their three ladies (Dante’s being the first lady who screened his love), might take a voyage over enchanted seas in Merlin’s magic barque. Several admirable sonnets, now included in this group, were formerly attributed to Cino da Pistoia.[14] (_b_) The tenzone with Forese Donati forms a little group apart. Its date is uncertain, but may be plausibly taken as between 1290 and 1296. These sonnets, though not free from bitterness which is perhaps serious, may be regarded as exercises in that style of burlesque and satirical poetry to which even Guido Guinizelli had once paid tribute, and which Rustico di Filippo had made characteristically Florentine. (_c_) Next comes a group of poems, connected with the allegory of the _Convivio_, in which an intellectual ideal is pursued with the passion and wooed in the language of the lover who adores an earthly mistress. “I say and affirm that the lady, of whom I was enamoured after my first love, was the most beautiful and most pure daughter of the Emperor of the Universe, to whom Pythagoras gave the name Philosophy” (_Conv._ ii. 16). By some, not entirely reconcilable, process the _donna gentile_, who appears at the end of the _Vita Nuova_, has become a symbol of Philosophy, and the poet’s love for her a most noble devotion. The canzone: Voi che ’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete, “Ye who by understanding move the third heaven” describing the conflict in Dante’s mind between this new love and the memory of Beatrice, deals again with the matter of one of the sonnets of the _Vita Nuova_; but the allegory is perhaps an after-thought. It is commented upon in the second treatise of the _Convivio_ and quoted in Canto viii. of the _Paradiso_. The other poems of this group seem purely allegorical: “By love, in this allegory, is always intended that study which is the application of the enamoured mind to that thing of which it is enamoured” (_Conv._ ii. 16). At first this service is painful and laborious; and the mystical lady seems a cruel and proud mistress, as she is represented in the “pitiful ballata”: Voi che savete ragionar d’Amore, “Ye who know how to discourse of love,” which is referred to in the third treatise of the _Convivio_ (iii. 9). But the defect is on the lover’s own part, and in her light the difficulties which sundered him and her are dispersed like morning clouds before the face of the sun. This mystical worship culminates in the supreme hymn to his spiritual mistress, whose body is Wisdom and whose soul is Love: