Guittone d'Arezzo is the direct literary ancestor of Dante, and the first original Italian poet. Hence he deserves a word or two even in this brief sketch. He was born in 1230 near Arezzo in Tuscany, hence his name; after a youth spent in the pursuit of pleasure, he was converted, and looking on all things earthly as mere vanities, he left his wife and family and joined the recently founded military-religious order of the Knights of Saint Mary. He died at Florence in 1294. In early life he had been gay and dissipated; his last years he spent in the exercises of religious asceticism. These two parts of his life correspond to two phases of his poetry. In the first he was a follower of the Sicilian school and wrote love poetry; in the second he discarded this "foolishness" and wrote political, moral, and theological discussions in verse. His poetry has little esthetic value, but is important as forming a transition between the early Sicilian school and the group of poets whose greatest member was Dante. His writings against earthly love and his praise of heavenly love mark an important change in the development of Italian poetry and open the path which leads up to Beatrice and the Divine Comedy. The next important step in this progress is marked by Guido Guinicelli, a learned lawyer and judge of Bologna (situated in the province of Romagna and separated from Tuscany by the Apennines), a city which at that time was the seat of a flourishing university and the center of a keen intellectual life. Guinicelli was born in 1220, was prominent in political as well as in literary circles, was banished in 1274, and died in 1276. He was a follower of Guittone, and like him his first poetry was in the manner of the Sicilian school. He changed later and began a new school, the _dolce stile nuova_, as Dante calls it. The change shows itself especially in the new conception of love, and of its origin, growth, and effects. The troubadours and their Sicilian imitators declared that love came from seeing, that it entered through the eyes of the beholder, and thence descended to the heart. Guinicelli says, on the contrary, that love does not come from without, but dwells, "as a bird in its nest," in the heart and is an attribute thereof. This is not true, however, of all men, but only of those who are virtuous and good. Only the gentle heart can love, and a noble character is not the effect of love, but its cause. These sentiments are expressed in the following lines, translated by Rossetti: "Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, As birds within the green shade of the grove. Before the gentle heart, in Nature's scheme, Love was not, or the gentle heart ere Love. For with the sun, at once, So sprang the light immediately, nor was Its birth before the sun's. And Love hath its effect in gentleness Of very self; even as Within the middle fire the heat's excess."