Beatrice is now seventeen, she is walking with two companions in a public place, she meets Dante and allows herself to utter a few words of graceful greeting. It is the first time she has spoken to him, and Dante's soul is thrilled and fired to its very depths. Not many hours afterwards, the poet began the first of his sonnets that we still possess, perhaps the first he ever wrote.[3] * * * * * Let us pass over eight or nine years more. Dante, now about twenty-six, is the very flower of chivalry and poetry. The foremost men of his own and other cities--artists, musicians, poets, scholars, and statesmen--are his friends. Somewhat hard of access and reserved, but the most fascinating of companions and the faithfulest of friends to those who have found a real place in his heart, Dante takes a rank of acknowledged eminence amongst the poets of his day. His verses, chiefly in praise of Beatrice, are written in a strain of tender sentiment, that gives little sign of what is ultimately to come out of him, but there is a nervous and concentrated power of diction, a purity and elevation of conception in them, which may not have been obvious to his companions as separating him from them, but which to eyes instructed by the result is full of deepest meaning. And what of Beatrice? She is dead. It was never given to Dante to call her his. We know not so much as whether he even aspired to more than that gracious salutation in which, to use his own expression, he seemed to touch 'the very limits of beatitude.'[4] Be this as it may, it is certain that Beatrice married a powerful citizen of Florence several years before her death. But she was still the guardian angel of the poet's life, she was still the very type of womanhood to him; and there was not a word or thought of his towards her but was full of utter courtesy and purity. And now, in the flower of her loveliness she is cut down by death, and to Dante life has become a wilderness.[5] * * * * * Yet eight or nine years more. Dante is now in what his philosophical system regards as the very prime of life.[6] He is thirty-five. The date is 1300. Since we left him weeping for the death of Beatrice, the unity of his life has been shattered and he has lost his way, but only for a time. Now his powers and purposes are richer, stronger, more concentrated than ever. In his first passion of grief for Beatrice's death he had been profoundly touched by the pity of a gentle-eyed damsel whom a far from groundless conjecture identifies with Gemma Donati, the lady whom he married not long afterwards. With this Gemma he lived till his banishment, and they had a numerous family. The internal evidence of Dante's works, and the few circumstances really known to us, give little support to the tradition that their marriage was an unhappy one.