I do not insist upon Dante's conception; if I began I could not cease; besides, you might think this a wild imagination of one poet's heart. So I will rather read to you a few verses of the deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest men of the thirteenth, or early fourteenth century, preserved among many other such records of knightly honor and love, which Dante Rossetti has gathered for us from among the early Italian poets. "For lo! thy law is passed That this my love should manifestly be To serve and honor thee; And so I do; and my delight is full, Accepted for the servant of thy rule. "Without almost, I am all rapturous, Since thus my will was set To serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence; Nor ever seems it anything could rouse A pain or regret, But on thee dwells mine every thought and sense; Considering that from thee all virtues spread As from a fountain head,-- _That in thy gift is wisdom's best avail,_ _And honor without fail;_ With whom each sovereign good dwells separate, Fulfilling the perfection of thy state. "Lady, since I conceived That pleasurable aspect in my heart, _My life has been apart_ _In shining brightness and the place of truth;_ Which till that time, good sooth, Groped among shadows in a darken'd place, Where many hours and days It hardly ever had remember'd good. But now my servitude Is thine, and I am full of joy and rest. A man from a wild beast Thou madest me, since for thy love I lived." 61. You may think, perhaps, a Greek knight would have had a lower estimate of women than this Christian lover. His spiritual subjection to them was, indeed, not so absolute; but as regards their own personal character, it was only because you could not have followed me so easily, that I did not take the Greek women instead of Shakespeare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of human beauty and faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; the divine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness and simple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of that of Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient, fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister and daughter, in Antigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; and, finally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to the soul of the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, to save her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of death.