love, listen as they might
listen to some new and unaccountably sweet music, touched and honoured,
and feeling towards Dante as towards some beautiful, half-mad thing. He
talks of her, sings of her, and is happy; the strangest thing in this
intensely real narrative of real love is this complete satisfaction of
the passion in its own existence, this complete absence of all desire or
hope. But this happiness is interrupted by the sudden, terrible thought
that one day all this must cease; the horrible, logical necessity coming
straight home to him, that one day she must die--"Di necessita conviene
che la gentilissima Beatrice alcuna volta si muoia." There is nothing
truer, more intensely pathetic, in all literature, than this frightful
pang of evil, not real, but first imagined; this frightful nightmare
vision of the end coming when reality is still happy. Have we not all of
us at one time felt the horrible shudder of that sudden perception that
happiness must end; that the beloved, the living, must die; that this
thing the present, which we clasp tight with our arms, which throbs
against our breast, will in but few moments be gone, vanished, leaving
us to grasp mere phantom recollections? Compared with this the blow of
the actual death of Beatrice is gentle. And then, the truthfulness of
his narration how, with yearning, empty heart, hungering after those
poor lost realities of happiness, after that occasional glimpse of his
lady, that rare catching of her voice, that blessed consciousness of her
existence, he little by little lets himself be consoled, cradled to
sleep like a child which has sobbed itself out, in the sympathy, the
vague love, of another--the Donna della Finestra--with whom he speaks of
Beatrice; and the sudden, terrified, starting up and shaking off of any
such base consolation, the wrath at any such mental infidelity to the
dead one, the indignant impatience with his own weakness, with his
baseness in not understanding that it is enough that Beatrice has lived
and that he has loved her, in not feeling that the glory and joy of the
ineffaceable past is sufficient for all present and future. A revolution
in himself which gradually merges in that grave final resolve, that
sudden seeing how Beatrice can be glorified by him, that solemn, quiet,
brief determination not to say any more of her as yet; not till he can
show her transfigured in Paradise. "After this sonnet there appeared
unto me a marvellous vision,