In the year 1265, then, Dante was born in Florence, then one of the most powerful and flourishing, but also, alas! one of the most factious and turbulent of the cities of Europe. He was but nine years old when he first met that Beatrice Portinari who became thenceforth the loadstar of his life. As to this lady we have little to say. The details which Dante's early biographers give us add but little to our knowledge of her, and so far as they are not drawn from the poet's own words, are merely such graceful commonplaces of laudatory description as any imagination of ordinary capacity would spontaneously supply for itself. When we have said that Beatrice was a beautiful, sweet, and virtuous girl, we have said all that we know, and all that we need care to know, of the daughter of Folco Portinari, who lived, was married, and died in Florence at the end of the thirteenth century. All that she is to us more than other Florentine maidens, she is to us through that poet who, as he wept her untimely death, hoped with no vain hope 'to write of her, what ne'er was writ of woman.'[1] * * * * * It puts no great strain on our powers of credence, to accept Dante's own statement of the rush of almost stupefying emotions which overwhelmed his childish heart when at the age of nine he went with his father to Portinari's house, and was sent to play with other children, amongst them the little Beatrice, a child of eight years old. The 'New Life' waked within him from that moment, and its strength and purity made him strong and pure.[2] * * * * * Nine more years have passed. Dante is now eighteen. He has made rapid progress in all the intellectual and personal accomplishments which are held to adorn the position of a Florentine gentleman. His teachers have in some cases already discerned the greatness of his powers, and he has become aware, probably by essays which never saw the light, that he has not only a poet's passions and aspirations, but a poet's power of moulding language into oneness with his thought. He and Beatrice know each other by sight, as neighbours or fellow-citizens, but Dante has never heard her voice address a word to him. Yet she is still the centre of all his thoughts. She has never ceased to be to him the perfect ideal of growing womanhood, and to his devout and fervid imagination, just because she is the very flower of womanly courtesy, grace, and virtue, she is an angel upon earth. Not in the hackneyed phrase of complimentary commonplace, not in the exaggerated cant of would-be poetical metaphor, but in the deep verity of his inmost life, Dante Alighieri believes that Beatrice Portinari, the maiden whose purity keeps him pure, whose grace and beauty are as guardian angels watching over his life, has more of heaven than of earth about her and claims kindred with God's more perfect family.