There is no doubt that there has been a great deal of senseless talk about Platonic love, and that it drew after it much that was far from Platonic. We all know that one of the most conspicuous daughters of devotion is hypocrisy, but who can hold religion responsible because its garb is put on to disguise sin? The trouble is that the finest spirits are apt to be measured by the standards of the lowest. It is not easy to convince people of material ideals that all things are not to be brought to their level. But this curious agitation had its place and did its work. We may smile at the finely drawn sophistries of a Bembo, who pointed to an ideal he sometimes failed to reach. It is easy enough for cynics to say that Beatrice, the apotheosis of spiritual love, died early, and was worshiped, not as a woman, but as a star shining from inaccessible heights; that Laura, the ideal of the high priest of Platonism, was simply a dream, intangible as the moonlight and cold as the everlasting snows; that it is not good for every-day men and women to see such visions, even if it were possible, nor to dream such dreams, nor to live at such an altitude--all of which no doubt has its side of truth. But the fact remains that it was largely through the inspired vision, which looked past the entanglements of sense into the pure heart and transparent soul of an idealized womanhood, that the long-enduring sex came into its intellectual kingdom. To the old ties of interest, passion, and habit, were added those of the intellect and spirit. In this new contact of intelligences society had its birth, women took their rightful places, and the world found a new regenerating force. IV The life at Urbino, with its literary flavor, its refined manners, its serious conversations, and its Platonic dreams, took another tone at Ferrara. This court was gayer, but hardly less noted as a center of culture. No one chronicled its conversations, but the fame of its poets illuminated it. Boiardo lived and wrote and administered affairs in the magnificent old castle whose four towers frown to-day in lonely grandeur over the silent and grass-grown streets of the once lively city; Ariosto immortalized the women “as fair as good, and as learned as they were fair,” who gathered artists, men of letters, statesmen, cardinals, and philosophers within its tapestried walls; and the genius of Tasso still sheds over it a melancholy splendor strangely contrasting with the tragedy that left so dark a cloud on the last days of its glory.