uring or obsolete silliness. But there is nothing at which to
laugh in such childish fascinations; the wonderful, the perfect, is more
open to us as children than it is afterwards: a word, a picture, a
snatch of music will have for us an ineffable, mysterious meaning; and
how much more so some human being, often some other, more brilliant
child from whose immediate contact we are severed by some circumstance,
perhaps by our own consciousness of inferiority, which makes that other
appear strangely distant, above us, moving in a world of glory which we
scarcely hope to approach; a child sometimes, or sometimes some grown
person, beautiful, brilliant, who sings or talks or looks at us, the
child, with ways which we do not understand, like some fairy or goddess.
No indeed, there is nothing to laugh at in this, in this first
blossoming of that love for higher and more beautiful things, which in
most of us is trodden down, left to wither, by our maturer selves;
nothing to make us laugh; nay, rather to make us sigh that later on we
see too well, see others too much on their real level, scrutinize too
much; too much, alas, for what at best is but an imperfect creature. And
in this state of fascination does the child Dante see the child
Beatrice, as a strange, glorious little vision from a childish sphere
quite above him; treasuring up that vision, till with his growth it
expands and grows more beautiful and noble, but none the less
fascinating and full of awfulness. When, therefore, the grave young
poet, full of the yearning for Paradise (but Paradise vaguer, sweeter,
less metaphysic and theological than the Paradise of his manhood); as
yet but a gracious, learned youth, his terrible moral muscle still
undeveloped by struggle, the noble and delicate dreamer of Giotto's
fresco, with the long, thin, almost womanish face, marked only by dreamy
eyes and lips, wandering through this young Florence of the Middle
Ages--when, I say, he meets after long years, the noble and gentle
woman, serious and cheerful and candid; and is told that she is that
same child who was the queen and goddess of his childish fancies; then
the vague glory with which his soul is filled expands and enwraps the
beloved figure, so familiar and yet so new. And the blood retreats from
his veins, and he trembles; and a vague god within him, half allegory,
half reality, cries out to him that a new life for him has begun.
Beatrice has become the ideal; Beatrice, the re