She was closely guarded, and evidently ran no risk
of smirching her good name by associating with a troubadour student. He
could sing songs about her--this she could not help--but beyond this
there was nothing doing.

Only once after this did they come near meeting. It was at a
wedding-party where Dante had gone evidently without an invitation. He
inwardly debated whether he should remain to the feast or not, and the
ayes had it. He was about to be seated at the table, when a sudden sense
of first heat and then cold came over him and he grasped his chair for
support. The light seemed blinding. He closed his eyes, and then opened
them; and looking up, on the opposite side of the room he saw his
Beatrice!

A friend seeing his agitation and thinking him ill, led him forth into
the open air and there chafed his icy fingers asking, "What can it
be--what is the matter?"

And Dante answered, "Of a surety I have set my feet on a point of life
beyond which he must not pass who would return!"

Immediately thereafter--probably the next day--Dante began a poem, very
carefully thought out, in celebration of the beauty and virtue of
Beatrice. He had written but one stanza when he tells us that, "The Lord
God of Justice called my most gracious Lady to Himself." And Beatrice
was dead, aged twenty-five years.

Through her death Dante was indeed wedded to her memory. He calls her
the bride of his soul.

* * * * *

We can not resign from life gracefully. Work has to be performed, even
when calamity comes, and we stand by an open grave and ask old Job's
question, "If a man die shall he live again?"

Dante felt sure that Beatrice must live again in all her loveliness.
"Heaven had need of her," he cries in his grief. And then again, "She
belonged not here, and so God took her to Himself." At first he was dumb
with sorrow, and then tears came to his relief, and a little later he
eased his soul through expression: he indited an open letter, a kind of
poetic proclamation to the citizens of Florence, in which he rehearsed
their loss and offered them consolation in the thought that they now had
a guardian angel in Heaven.

The lover, like an artist or skilled workman, always exaggerates the
importance of his passion, and links his love with the universal welfare
of mankind.

And stay! after all he may be right--who knows! So a year passed away in
sadness, with a few bad turnings into sensuality, followe