t I fell
vanquished and what I then became she knoweth who gave me the cause"
(Purg. XXXI, 49). He arose forgiven, the memory of his sin removed by
the waters of Lethe. Then drinking of the waters of Eunoe he was made
fit to ascend to Heaven.

To understand the allusion to his defection and to see the progressive
development of his love of Beatrice as a woman, then as a living ideal
and finally as an animated symbol--the various transfigurations in which
Beatrice appears to him, we must go back to his New Life--the book of
which Charles Eliot Norton says--"so long as there are lovers in the
world and so long as lovers are poets this first and tenderest
love-story of modern literature will be read with appreciation and
responsive sympathy."

It is hardly to be supposed that the nine year old lover noted with
minute care in his diary, his first meeting of Beatrice Portinari but as
he looked back on the event years later he saw that the vision had been
the the greatest crisis in his mental, moral and spiritual history. The
story begins in the first page of the New Life. A real living child
familiarly called Bice, the diminutive for Beatrice, enamoured Dante
with a real, genuine love. "After that meeting," says the poet, "I in my
boyhood often went seeking her and saw her of such noble and
praiseworthy deportment that truly of her might be said the word of the
poet Homer: 'She seems not the daughter of mortal man but of God.'" Nine
years passed and the child, now a maiden, "blooming in her beauty's
spring, saluted me with such virtue that it seemed to me that I saw all
the bounds of bliss. Since it was the first time her words came to my
ears I took in such sweetness that, as it were intoxicated, I turned
away from the folk and betaking myself to the solitude of my own
chamber I sat myself down to think of this most courteous lady."

A little later the wrapt expression of his loving eyes as he looks at
Beatrice attracts the attention of others and to misdirect them, he
feigns love for the lady he calls the screen of truth and writes verses
in her honor. On the part of Beatrice there is misunderstanding of the
amatory verses he writes at this period and she withholds her greeting.
Then, more than ever, he realizes what that salutation meant to him.
Deprived of it now, he dwells upon the sweet memory of the salutation:
"In the hope of her marvelous salutation there no longer remained to me
an enemy, nay, a flame of charity