She at length ascends with him into the Heaven of Heavens, to the source of eternal and uncreated light, without shadow and without bound; and when Dante looks round for her, he finds she has quitted his side, and has taken her place throned among the supremely blessed, "as far above him as the region of thunder is above the centre of the sea:" he gazes up at her in a rapture of love and devotion, and in a sublime apostrophe invokes her still to continue her favour towards him. She looks down upon him from her effulgent height, smiles on him with celestial sweetness, and then fixing her eyes on the eternal fountain of glory, is absorbed in ecstasy. Here we leave her: the poet had touched the limits of permitted thought; the seraph wings of imagination, borne upwards by the inspiration of deep love, could no higher soar,--the audacity of genius could dare no farther! * * * * * Dante died at Ravenna in 1321, and was sumptuously interred at the cost of Guido da Polenta, the father of that unfortunate Francesca di Rimini, whose story he has so exquisitely told in the fifth canto of the Inferno. He left several sons and an only daughter, whom he had named Beatrice, in remembrance of his early love: she became a nun at Ravenna. Now where, in the name of all truth and all feeling, were the heads, or rather the hearts, of those commentators, who could see nothing in the Beatrice thus beautifully pourtrayed, thus tenderly lamented, and thus sublimely commemorated, but a mere allegorical personage, the creation of a poet's fancy? Nothing can come of nothing; and it was no unreal or imaginary being who turned the course of Dante's ardent passions and active spirit, and burning enthusiasm, into one sweeping torrent of love and poetry, and gave to Italy and to the world the Divina Commedia! FOOTNOTES: [44] This marriage was one of policy, and negociated by the friends of Dante and of Gemma Donati: her temper was violent and harsh, and their domestic peace was, probably, not increased by Dante's obstinate regret for his first love. CHAPTER X. CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD. After Italy, England,--who has ever trod in her footsteps, and at length outstript her in the race of intellect,--was the next to produce a great and prevailing genius in poetry, a master-spirit, whom no change of customs, manners, or language, can render wholly obsolete; and who was destined, like the rest of his tribe, to bow before the influence of woman, to toil in her praise, and soar by her inspiration. Seven years after the death of Dante, Chaucer was born, and he was twenty-four years younger than Petrarch, whom he met at Padua in 1373; this meeting between the two great poets was memorable in itself, and yet more interesting for having first introduced into the English language that beautiful monument to the virtue of women,--the story of Griselda.