c rationalism, was love. Love
which assuredly meant different things to different minds; a passionate
benevolence towards man and beast to godlike simpletons like Francis of
Assisi; a mere creative and impassive activity of the divinity to
deep-seeing (so deep as to see only their own strange passionate eyes
and lips reflected in the dark well of knowledge) and almost pantheistic
thinkers like Master Eckhardt; but love nevertheless, love. "Amor,
amore, ardo d' amore," St. Francis had sung in a wild rhapsody, a sort
of mystic dance, a kind of furious _malaguena_ of divine love; and that
he who would wish to know God, let him love--"Qui vult habere notitiam
Dei, amet," had been written by Hugo of St. Victor, one of the subtlest
of all the mystics. "Amor oculus est," said Master Eckhardt; love,
love--was not love then the highest of all human faculties, and must not
the act of loving, of perceiving God's essence in some creature which
had virtue, the soul's beauty, and beauty, the body's virtue, be the
noblest business of a noble life? Thus argued the poets; and their
argument, half-passionate, half-scholastic, mixing Phaedrus and
Bonaventura, the Schools of Alexandria and the Courts of Love of
Provence, resulted in adding all the fervid reality of philosophical and
religious aspiration to their clear and cold phantom of disembodied love
of woman.

Little by little therefore, together with the carnal desires of
Provencals and Sicilians, the Tuscan poets put behind them those little
coquetries of style and manner, complications of metre and rhythm
learned and fantastic as a woman's plaited and braided hair; those
metaphors and similes, like bright flowers or shining golden ribbons
dropped from the lady's bosom and head and eagerly snatched by the
lover, which we still find, curiously transformed and scented with the
rosemary and thyme of country lanes, in the peasant poetry of modern
Tuscany. Little by little does the love poetry of the Italians reject
such ornaments; and cloth itself in that pale garment, pale and stately
in heavy folds like a nun's or friar's weeds, but pure and radiant and
solemn as the garment of some painted angel, which we have all learned
to know from the "Vita Nuova."

To describe this poetry of the immediate precursors and contemporaries
of Dante is to the last degree difficult: it can be described only by
symbols, and symbols can but mislead us. Dante Rossetti himself, after
translating with exq