s of
angels. There, after saluting the good Brother, he drew out from a
great painted chest one of the books newly come from Constantinople,
laid it on a desk and began to turn over the leaves. It was a
Treatise on Love, writ in Greek by the divine Plato. Messer Guido
sighed; his hands began to tremble and his eyes filled with tears.

"Alas!" he muttered; "hid beneath these signs is the Light, and I cannot
see it."

He said thus to himself, because the knowledge of the Greek tongue was
then altogether lost in the West. After many a long-drawn groan, he took
the book, and kissing it, laid it in the iron chest like a beautiful
dead woman in her coffin. Then he asked the good Fra Sisto to give him
the Manuscript of the Speeches of Cicero, which he read, till the shades
of evening, glooming down on the cypresses in the Cloister garden,
spread their batlike wings over the pages of his book. For you must know
Messer Guido Cavalcanti was a searcher after truth in the writings of
the Ancients, and was for treading the arduous ways that lead mankind to
immortality. Devoured by the noble longing of discovery, he would set
out in canzones the doctrines of the old-world Sages concerning Love
which is the path to Virtue.

A few days later, Messer Betto Brunelleschi came to visit him at his own
house on the promenade of the Adimari, at the peep of day, the hour when
the lark sings in the corn. He found him still abed, and after kissing
him, said tenderly:

"My Guido, my Guido lad! put me out of my pain. Last week you told me
you were on your way to visit your Lady in the Church and Cloister of
Santa Maria Novella. Ever since I have been turning, turning your words
in my head, without fathoming their meaning. I shall have no peace till
you have given me an explanation of them. I beseech you, tell me what
you meant--so far, that is, as your discretion shall suffer you, seeing
the matter doth concern a lady."

Messer Guido burst out a-laughing. Raising himself on his elbow in bed,
he looked Messer Betto in the eyes.

"Friend!" said he, "the Lady I spoke to you of hath more than one
habitation. The day you saw me going to visit her, I found her in the
Library of Santa Maria Novella. But alack! I heard but the one half of
her discourse, for she spoke to me in both of the two languages that
flow like honey from her adorable lips. First she delivered me a
discourse in the tongue of the Greeks, which I could not comprehend,
then she