Perhaps this merely means that the lady was disdainful; had she been otherwise the poet might never have written sonnets about her, and surely not sonnets in which her charms were reduced to a Platonic reminiscence of a fairer ideal. But it is this turning away of the face of love, this ephemeral quality of its embodiments, that usually stimulates the imagination to the construction of a supersensible ideal in which all those evaporated impulses may meet again and rest in an adequate and permanent object. So that while Guido's "death-wound" was perhaps in reality nothing but the rebuff offered him by a prospective mistress, yet the sting of it, in a mind of Platonic habit, served at once to enforce the distinction between the ideal beauty, so full of sweetness and heavenly charm, which had tempted the soul out of his heart on its brief adventure, and the particular and real object against which the soul was dashed, and from which it returned bruised and troubled to its inward solitude. So the meditative Guido represents his experience: a new planet swam into his ken radiant with every grace and virtue; yet all the magic of that lady lay in her resemblance to the mysterious Giovanna, the double of Beatrice, the ideal of the poet's imagination. The soul, at first, went out eagerly to the new love as to an image and embodiment of the old, but was afraid, and justly, to mention the ideal in the presence of the reality. There is always danger in doing that; it breaks the spell and reduces us again to the old and patient loyalty to the unseen. The present thing being so like the ideal we unhesitatingly pursue it: but we are quickly disappointed, and the soul returns sighing and mortally wounded, as the new object of passion fades away. We may now understand somewhat better that strange combination of loyalty and disloyalty which we find in Dante. While the object of love is any particular thing, it excludes all others; but it includes all others as soon as it becomes a general ideal. All beauties attract by suggesting the ideal and then fail to satisfy by not fulfilling it. While Giovanna remained a woman, Guido, as his after life plainly showed, had no difficulty in forgetting her and in loving many others with a frank heart; but when Giovanna had become a name for the absolute ideal, that sovereign mistress could never be forgotten, and the thought of her subordinated every particular attachment and called the soul away from it. Compared with the ideal, every human perfection becomes a shadow and a deceit; every mortal passion leaves, as Keats has told us, "A heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead and a parching tongue."