existence, should be busied with things of the soul, truth,
good, and beauty, and not with things of the body. Hence the love of
such a gradually improving and humanizing man for a gradually improving
and humanizing woman, should become, as much as is possible, a
connection of the higher and more human, rather than of the lower and
more bestial, portions of their nature; it should tend, in its
reciprocal stimulation, to make the man more a man, the woman more a
woman, to make both less of the mere male and female animals that they
were. In brief, love should increase, instead, like that which oftenest
profanes love's name, of diminishing, the power of aspiration, of
self-direction, of self-restraint, which may exist within us. Now to
tend to this is to tend towards the love of the "Vita Nuova;" to tend
towards the love of the "Vita Nuova" is to tend towards this. Say what
you will of the irresistible force of original constitution, it remains
certain, and all history is there as witness, that mankind--that is to
say, the only mankind in whom lies the initiative of good, mankind which
can judge and select--possesses the faculty of feeling and acting in
accordance with its standard of feeling and action; the faculty in great
measure of becoming that which it thinks desirable to become. Now to
have perceived the even imaginary existence of such a passion as that of
Dante for Beatrice, must be, for all who can perceive it, the first step
towards attempting to bring into reality a something of that passion:
the real passion conceived while the remembrance of that ideal passion
be still in the mind will bear to it a certain resemblance, even as,
according to the ancients, the children born of mothers whose rooms
contained some image of Apollo or Adonis would have in them a reflex,
however faint, of that beauty in whose presence they came into
existence. In short, it seems to me, that as the "Vita Nuova" embodies
the utmost ideal of absolutely spiritual love, and as to spiritualize
love must long remain one of the chief moral necessities of the world,
there exists in this book a moral force, a moral value, a power in its
unearthly passion and purity, which, as much as anything more
deliberately unselfish, more self-consciously ethical, we must
acknowledge and honour as holy.

As the love of him who has read and felt the "Vita Nuova" cannot but
strive towards a purer nature, so also the love of which poets sang
became also nob