With these words, with which the _Vita Nuova_ ends, the _Divina Commedia_ is announced. Voltaire commended an imbecile for calling the latter a monster. It is regrettable that there are not more like it. Other imbeciles have called Beatrice an abstraction. That she lived is fully attested. Dante admired a child who became a young woman from whom he asked next to nothing, which, being refused, he asked nothing at all, contenting himself with laudations. From that moment, Beatrice, who had really been, ceased to really be. She became a personified worship. Finally she died and her death was her assumption, an apotheosis in which typifying the Eternal Feminine, she lifted the poet from sphere to sphere, from glory to glory, to the heights where, imperishable, he stands. Said Tennyson: King that hast reigned six hundred years and grown In power and ever growest ... I, wearing but the garland of a day Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away. The tribute, perfect in itself, was perfectly deserved. There never was such tenderness as Dante's. There never was such intensity. Save only in the case of the human oceans that men call Homer and Shakespeare, there never has been such greatness. Homer engendered antiquity. From Dante modernity proceeds. Of Shakespeare, England was born. Without resemblance to one another, on their thrones in the ideal each sits alone. Behind them is the past, at their feet the present, before them the centuries unroll. They are the immortals. They have all time as we all have our day. It is from them we get our daily bread. Their genius feeds our starving soul. Talent has never done that. Talent makes us laugh and forget and yawn. Talent is agreeable, it provides us with pleasures, with means of getting rid of time. But to the heart it brings no message, for the soul it has no food. It is ephemeral, not eternal. Only genius and its art endure. The genius of Dante, Beatrice awoke, of his art she was the inspiration. For that be she, as he called her, Blessed,--thrice Blessed since she did not love him. Had she loved him, he could not have done better, that is not possible, and he might have omitted to do as well. Dante made Francesca say of Paolo: Questi che mai da me non fia diviso, La bocca mi baciò tutto tremente. Francesca added: