There is one other topic to be considered, which must keenly interest both readers of Dante in particular, and students of literature, including English, in general. Before his great masterpiece, Dante had written a work in which stately prose alternates with grave and stately sonnets. This was the _Vita Nuova_ (or _New Life_), a work full of a profoundly touching, if quaint, nobility of manner, and one which places Dante more humanly, so to speak, among the writers of his time. His sonnets, we have said, are a prelude to greater work. They are the outcome of his era. The attitude towards love comes from Provence, and the sonnet from Sicily, while a certain allegorical metaphysics had been imparted by the Italian Guido Guinicelli, who had combined with the troubadour spirit the philosophic learning—such as it was—of Bologna. Dante had contemporaries, Guido Cavalcanti and Cino da Pistoia, who composed sonnets in a vein closely resembling that of the greater master. And in all of them the treatment is of one and the same thing—love. In a previous chapter we have spoken of the conventional theory of that affection as established in Provence, and have anticipated its connection with the immortalized Beatrice of Dante and the Laura of Petrarch. Woman, it will be remembered, had been sublimated into something half divine, an object of a distant devotion, shrouded in a semi-religious haze. Following the Provençal fashion, every Tuscan poet—putting, it is true, into his work a finer and graver spirit than that of his Provençal models—felt bound to devote himself, or to profess to devote himself, to some such ennobling object of affection. To that real or imaginary being he addressed his sonnets, from her he sought inspiration, by the ideal of her he guided his life. We shall find this phenomenon in its completest form in Petrarch, from whom it passed to our English sonneteers. Sometimes the sentiment was absolutely real, as real as the Rosalind of Spenser’s _Amoretti_. We cannot but believe that in the first instance it was so with Dante, when he wrote of Beatrice in his _Vita Nuova_, possibly even when he commemorated her in the _Divine Comedy_. We cannot but believe that he loved a real Beatrice de’ Portinari, whom he first saw at nine years of age, with a pure and elevated sentiment, and that he encouraged the sentiment as the means of uplifting and stimulating his genius and his soul. And we must believe that he is in earnest when, after her death, he makes her not only the type of all that is best in womanhood, but converts her into an abstract emblem of celestial wisdom. There is the very sound of truth in the words wherein he tells us of their first meeting. Rossetti translates them thus: “At that moment, I say most truly, that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of my heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith, and in trembling it said these