This sweet and gentle type of womanhood, round whose earthly life the genius and devotion of Dante have twined a wreath of the tenderest poetry, the most romantic love, that ever rose from heart of man, had been to him in life and death the vehicle and messenger of God's highest grace. Round her memory clustered all the noblest purposes and purest motives of his life, and in her spirit seemed to be reflected the divinest truth, the loftiest wisdom, that the human soul could comprehend. And so, making her objectively and in the scheme of the universe what she had really been and was to him subjectively, he came to regard her as the symbol of Divine philosophy as Virgil was the symbol of human virtue and wisdom. Touched by the glow of an ideal love, Dante had reached a deeper knowledge, a fuller grace, than the wisdom of this world could teach or gain. The doctors of the Church, the sweet singers, the mighty heroes, the profound philosophers, who had instructed and supported him, had none of them touched his life so deeply, had none of them led him so far into the secret place of truth, had none of them brought him so near to God, as that sweet child, that lovely maid, that pure woman, who had given him his first and noblest ideal. Now to Dante and to his age it was far from unnatural to erect concrete human beings into abstract types or personifications. Leah and Rachel are the active and the contemplative life respectively. Virgil, we have seen, is human philosophy. Cato of Utica represents the triumph over the carnal nature and the passions. And it is not only the Old Testament and classical antiquity that furnish these types. The celebrated Countess Matilda, who lived only about two centuries before Dante himself, becomes in his poem, according to the generally received interpretation, one of the attributes of God personified. And so Beatrice became the personification of that heavenly wisdom, that true knowledge of God, of which she had been the vehicle to Dante. But to the poet and to the age in which he lived, it was impossible to separate this heavenly wisdom in its simple, spiritual essence, from the form which its exposition had received at the hands of the great teachers of the Church. To them true spiritual wisdom, personal experience and knowledge of God, were inseparable from _theology_. The two united in the conception of Divine philosophy. Thus by a strange but intelligible gradation Dante blended in his conception of Beatrice two elements which seem to us the very extreme of incompatibility. She is in the first place the personification of scholastic theology, with all its subtle intricacy of pedantic method; she is in the second place the maiden to whom Dante sang his songs of love in Florence, and whose early death he wept disconsolate. And in the closing scenes of the Purgatory these two conceptions are more intimately blended, perhaps, than anywhere else in Dante's writings.