When writing the _Vita Nuova_, that story of his love for Beatrice which he calls the work of his boyhood,[138] he was haunted by the sublime idea of the rolling spheres. Beatrice at her first appearance as a little girl of eight, and Beatrice when she died, suggested thoughts of the nine heavens;[139] almost the first words of the book allude to the circling spheres of the sun and of the stars:[140] and the last sonnet soars beyond them all to the Empyrean.[141] Already he seems to have read Alfraganus, for he takes a suggestion which occurs in the first chapter of the _Elementa Astronomica et Chronologica_. Alfraganus there describes the different methods of reckoning days, months, and years, in use among different nations, and gives a special list of the Syrian months with their corresponding Roman months; and Dante, by using the Arabian system of days and the Syrian months, is able to prove to himself that the day and the month when Beatrice died were both at the sacred number of nine.[142] According to our method of reckoning, the time was sunset on the eighth of June, but this was the first hour of the ninth day according to Arabian usage, and our sixth month corresponds with the ninth of the Syrians. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [138] _Conv._ I. i. 125, 126. Compare _Conv._ IV. xxiv. 1-13. [139] _V. N._ ii. 9-12, xxx. 13-24. [140] _V. N._ ii. 1-12. [141] _V. N._ xlii. 47. [142] _V. N._ xxx. 1-6. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dante had also read at this time Aristotle’s doctrines about the spheres and their Movers, for he quotes from the _Metaphysics_,[143] and this is the work in which they are found. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [143] _V. N._ xlii. 30. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Yet a familiarity with Alfraganus and Aristotle so early as this is hardly consistent with the difficulty he says he found in understanding Latin books of philosophy some time after the death of Beatrice.[144] Perhaps the latter part of the _Vita Nuova_ was written a good deal later; or it may be not altogether frivolous to suggest that in his youth Dante had read the first chapters of Alfraganus, which are easy, but did not master the rest of the book till later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [144] _Conv._ II. xiii. 22-26. ------------------------------------------------------------------------