n he might have supplanted Dei Bardi. Dante too was
_gentiluomo_. In addition he was famous. Had he asked, doubtless it would
have been given. But Dante, nourished on troubadourian verse and views,
held love to be incompatible with marriage. Afterward, if any Provencal
suggestion of extra-matrimonial possibilities presented itself, it was too
incongruous with the ideal to be detained. Even otherwise, shortly and
speedily Beatrice died and he very nearly died also.

The distraction of writing of her, of drawing angels that resembled her,
these occupations, combined with other incidents, consoled. Then presently
he had visions, among them one in which he saw that which decided him to
write nothing further until he could do so more worthily. "To that end,"
he said, "I labor all I can, as she well knows. Wherefore if it please
Him, through whom all things live, that my life be suffered to continue
yet awhile, I hope one day to say of her what has not been said of any
woman. After which may it please the Lord of Grace that my soul go hence
in quest of the Blessed Beatrice who now gazes continuously on the
countenance of Him qui est omnia secula benedictus. Laus Deo!"

With these words, with which the _Vita Nuova_ ends, the _Divina Commedia_
is announced. Voltaire commended an imbecile for calling the latter a
monster. It is regrettable that there are not more like it. Other
imbeciles have called Beatrice an abstraction. That she lived is fully
attested. Dante admired a child who became a young woman from whom he
asked next to nothing, which, being refused, he asked nothing at all,
contenting himself with laudations. From that moment, Beatrice, who had
really been, ceased to really be. She became a personified worship.
Finally she died and her death was her assumption, an apotheosis in which
typifying the Eternal Feminine, she lifted the poet from sphere to sphere,
from glory to glory, to the heights where, imperishable, he stands.

Said Tennyson:

King that hast reigned six hundred years and grown
In power and ever growest ...
I, wearing but the garland of a day
Cast at thy feet one flower that fades away.

The tribute, perfect in itself, was perfectly deserved. There never was
such tenderness as Dante's. There never was such intensity. Save only in
the case of the human oceans that men call Homer and Shakespeare, there
never has been such greatness.

Homer engendered antiquity. From Dante modernity