Vague forces, which the lover himself realises as mysterious, run high in the _Vita Nuova_ and in the poems; the lover has hallucinations in sleep and sickness. In the third canzone Dante speaks of the impossibility of comprehending what gave him a glimpse of the nature of his mistress. It was a foreboding of new and great things, struggling slowly and gradually to take shape, for the creation of a world-system, one of whose supporting pillars was personal love of an individual, was an unprecedented achievement. "When she speaks a spirit inclines from heaven." The angels implore God to call this "miracle" into their midst, but God wills that they shall have patience until the "Hope of the Blessed" appears. Love says of her can there be mortal thing At once adorned so richly and so pure? Then looks on her and silently affirms That heaven designed in her a creature new. (_Transl. by_ C. LYELL.) Again and again recurs the motif of her beauty before which the world must fall prostrate. In a sonnet not included in the _Vita Nuova_ he says: In heaven itself that lady had her birth, I think, and is with us for our behoof; Blessed are they who meet her on the earth. (_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.) The lover has a foreboding of the fate awaiting him: "I have set my feet into that phase of life from whence there is no return." He divines the sorrow to which love has predestined him. But others, too, divining that this man "expects more, perhaps, of love than others," ask him to explain to them the essence of love, and he answers them with the famous sonnet: _Amor e cor gentil sono una cosa_ (Love and the gentle heart are but one thing.) The death of Beatrice is accompanied by the same phenomena as was the death of Christ: the sun lost its brilliance, stars appeared in the sky, birds fell to the ground, dead, the earth trembled; God visibly intervened in the course of nature. For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead Such an exceeding glory went up hence, That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire, Until a sweet desire Entered Him for that lovely excellence, So that He bade her to Himself aspire; Counting this weary and most evil place Unworthy of a thing so full of grace. (_Transl. by_ D.G. ROSSETTI.)