f God. She is a miracle herself, a thing sent from heaven, a
spirit, as Dante says in that most beautiful of all his sonnets, the
summing up of all that the poets of his circle had said of their
lady--"Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare."

"She passes along the street so beautiful and gracious," says
Guinicelli, "that she humbles pride in all whom she greets, and makes
him of our faith if he does not yet believe. And no base man can come
into her presence. And I will tell you another virtue of her: no man can
think ought of evil as long as he looks upon her." "The noble mind which
I feel, on account of this youthful lady who has appeared, makes me
despise baseness and vileness," says Lapo Gianni. The women who surround
her are glorified in her glory, glorified in their womanhood and
companionship with her. "The ladies around you," says Cavalcanti, "are
dear to me for the sake of your love; and I pray them as they are
courteous, that they should do you all honour." She is, indeed, scarcely
a woman, and something more than a saint: an avatar, an incarnation of
that Amor who is born of virtue and beauty, and raises men's minds to
heaven; and when Cavalcanti speaks of his lady's portrait behind the
blazing tapers of Orsanmichele, it seems but natural that she should be
on an altar, in the Madonna's place. The idea of a mysterious
incarnation of love in the lady, or of a mystic relationship between her
and love, returns to these poets. Lapo Gianni tells us first that she is
Amor's sister, then speaks of her as Amor's bride; nay, in this love
theology of the thirteenth century, arises the same kind of confusion as
in the mystic disputes of the nature of the Godhead. A Sienese poet, Ugo
da Massa, goes so far as to say, "Amor and I are all one thing; and we
have one will and one heart; and if I were not, Amor were not; mind you,
do not think I am saying these things from subtlety ('e non pensate ch'
io 'l dica per arte'); for certainly it is true that I am love, and he
who should slay me would slay love."

Together with the knowledge of public life and of scholastic theories,
together with the love of occult and cabalistic science, and the craft
of Provencal poetry, Dante received from his Florence of the thirteenth
century the knowledge of this new, this exotic and esoteric intellectual
love. And, as it is the mission of genius to gather into an undying
whole, to model into a perfect form, the thoughts and feelings and
percept