“Grief brings daring into my heart,” which is cited in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ (associated with another poem of Giraut de Borneil) as a typical poem on _rectitudo_, “righteousness,” “the direction of the will” (_V. E._ ii. 2). These two canzoni are the connecting link between the _Rime_ and the _Commedia_; the first contains the germ of Dante’s prophecy of the _Veltro_, his Messianic hope of the Deliverer to come, who shall make Love’s darts shine with new lustre and renovate the world; in the second, we already catch the first notes of the _saeva indignatio_ of the sacred poem. With the exception of the “montanina canzone” and some sonnets to Cino da Pistoia, Dante wrote few other lyrics at this period[17]; indeed, one of the sonnets seems to imply that he had finally turned away from such poetry (_da queste nostre rime_) in contemplation of his greater task: Io mi credea del tutto esser partito, “I deemed myself to have utterly departed from these our rhymes, Messer Cino, for henceforth another path befits my ship and further from the shore.” 3. _The “Convivio”_ The _Convivio_, or “Banquet,” bears a somewhat similar relation to the work of Dante’s second period as the _Vita Nuova_ did to that of his adolescence. Just as after the death of Beatrice he collected his earlier lyrics, furnishing them with prose narrative and commentary, so now in exile he intended to put together fourteen of his later canzoni and write a prose commentary upon them, to the honour and glory of his mystical lady, Philosophy. Dante was certainly not acquainted with Plato’s _Symposium_. It was from the _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ of Boëthius that the idea came to him of representing Philosophy as a woman; but the “woman of ful greet reverence by semblaunt,” who “was ful of so greet age, that men ne wolde nat trowen, in no manere, that she were of oure elde” (so Chaucer renders Boëthius), is transformed to the likeness of a _donna gentile_, the idealised human personality of the poetry of the “dolce stil nuovo”: “And I imagined her fashioned as a gentle lady; and I could not imagine her in any bearing save that of compassion; wherefore so willingly did the sense of truth look upon her, that scarcely could I turn it from her. And from this imagining I began to go there where she revealed herself in very sooth, to wit, in the schools of religious and at the disputations of philosophers; so that in a short time, perchance of thirty months, I began to feel so much of her sweetness, that her love drove out and destroyed every other thought” (_Conv._ ii. 13).