Boccaccio, who knew Dante personally, tells us, that on the death of Beatrice, he was so changed by affliction that his best friends could scarcely recognise him. He scarcely eat or slept; he would not speak; he neglected his person, until he became "una cosa selvatica a vedere," _a savage thing to the eye_: to borrow his own strong expression, he seems to have been "grief-stung to madness." To the first Canzone, written after the death of Beatrice, Dante has prefixed a note, in which he tells us, that after he had long wept in silence the loss of her he loved, he thought to give utterance to his sorrow in words; and to compose a Canzone, in which he should write, (weeping as he wrote,) of the virtues of her who through much anguish had bowed his soul to the earth. "Then," he says, "I thus began:--gli occhi dolenti,"--which are the first words of this Canzone. It is addressed, like the others, to her female companions, whom alone he thought worthy to listen to her praises, and whose gentle hearts could alone sympathise in his grief. Non vo parlare altrui Se non a cor gentil, che 'n donna sia! One stanza of this Canzone is unequalled, I think, for a simplicity at once tender and sublime. The sentiment, or rather the meaning, in homely English phrase, would run thus:-- "Ascended is our Beatrice to the highest Heaven, to those realms where angels dwell in peace; and you, her fair companions, and Love and me, she has left, alas! behind. It was not the frost of winter that chilled her, nor was it the heat of summer that withered her; it was the power of her virtue, her humility, and her truth, that ascending into Heaven moved the ETERNAL FATHER to call her to himself, seeing that this miserable life was not worthy of any thing so fair, so excellent!" On the anniversary of the death of Beatrice, Dante tells us that he was sitting alone, thinking upon her, and tracing, as he meditated, the figure of an angel on his tablets.[43] Can any one doubt that this little incident, so natural and so affecting,--his thinking on his lost Beatrice, and by association sketching the figure of an angel, while his mind dwelt upon her removal to a brighter and better world,--must have been real? It gave rise to the 18th Sonnet of the Vita Nuova, which he calls "Il doloroso annovale," (the mournful anniversary.)