Something of this kind is what we may now attempt to do with regard to one or two Platonic ideas, ideas which under the often ironical title of Platonic love, are constantly referred to and seldom understood. These ideas may be defined as the transformation of the appreciation of beautiful things into the worship of an ideal beauty and the transformation of the love of particular persons into the love of God. These mystical phrases may acquire a new and more human meaning if we understand, at least in part, how they first came to be spoken. We shall then not think of them merely as the reported sayings of Plato or Plotinus, Porphyry or Proclus; we shall not learn them by rote, as the unhappy student learns the enigmas, which, in the histories of philosophy, represent all that survives of the doctrine of a Thales or a Pythagoras. We shall have some notion of the ideas that once prompted such speech. And we shall be the better able to reconstruct those conceptions inasmuch as the reflection by which they are bred has recurred often in the world--has recurred, very likely, in our own experience. We are often Platonists without knowing it. In some form or other Platonic ideas occur in all poetry of passion when it is seasoned with reflection. They are particularly characteristic of some Italian poets, scattered from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. These poets had souls naturally Platonic; even when they had heard something of Plato they borrowed nothing from him. They repeated his phrases, when they did so, merely to throw the authority of an ancient philosopher over the spontaneous suggestions of their own minds. Their Platonism was all their own: it was Christian, mediæval, and chivalrous, both in origin and expression. But it was all the more genuine for being a reincarnation rather than an imitation of the old wisdom. Nothing, for example, could be a better object-lesson in Platonism than the well-known sentimental history of Dante. There is no essential importance in the question whether Dante could have read anything of Plato or come indirectly under his influence. The Platonism of Dante, is, in any case, quite his own. It is the expression of his inner experience moulded by the chivalry and theology of his time. He tells us the story himself very quaintly in the "Vita Nuova."