Long before the day of Spenser there lived, however, in Florence, a poet whose transcendent genius enabled him to feel and describe for the first time the real romantic sentiment of Love. It is true that some of the poets of Chivalry had before him attempted to depict the supersensual, æthereal side of the passion. But their portraits lacked the touch of realism: they described what they imagined; Dante what he felt. Dante was born in 1265: Modern Love was born nine years later—613 years ago. “Nine times already since my birth,” says Dante, “had the heaven of light returned to the self-same point almost, as concerns its own revolution, when first the glorious lady of my mind was made manifest to mine eyes; even she who was called Beatrice (she who confers blessing) by many who knew not wherefore.... From that time onward, Love quite governed my soul.... But seeing that were I to dwell overmuch on the passions and doings of such early youth, my words might be counted something fabulous, I will therefore put them aside,” etc. These are the opening lines of the _Vita Nuova_, in which Modern Love is for the first time portrayed with an air of sincerity, and concerning which Professor C. E. Norton justly remarks that “so long as there are lovers in the world, and so long as lovers are poets, will this first and tenderest love-story of modern literature be read with appreciation and responsive sympathy.” What a privilege to describe First Love not only in an individual but a _historic_ sense, as Dante did in this poem, which Rossetti calls “the auto-biography or auto-psychology of Dante’s youth, till his twenty-seventh year.” After that first sight of Beatrice one of her sweet smiles was the highest goal of his desires; but so powerful was the spell of her presence that he was obliged to avoid her. “From that night forth the natural functions of my body began to be vexed and impeded, for I was given up wholly to thinking of this most gracious creature; whereby in short space I became so weak and so reduced that it was irksome to many of my friends to look upon me ... the thing was so plainly to be discerned in my countenance that there was no longer any means of concealing it.” Such words as “trembling,” “confusion,” “weeping,” constantly occur as the narrative proceeds. Love, he says, “bred in me such overpowering sweetness that my body, being all subjected thereto, remained many times helpless and passive.” When for the first time Beatrice denied him her smile, “I became possessed with such grief that, parting myself from others, _I went into a lonely place_ to bathe the ground with most bitter tears.” And in one of the sonnets interspersed he says— “My face shows my heart’s colour, No sooner do I lift mine eyes to look Than the blood seems as shaken from my heart, And all my pulses beat at once and stop.”