ducator and the moralist,--so
that grateful ages have consecrated it by his name. Centuries rolled
away, and among the descendants of Teutonic barbarians a still lovelier
and more ideal sentiment burst out from the lips of the Christian Dante,
kindled by the adoration of his departed Beatrice. And as she courses
from star to star, explaining to him the mysteries, the transported poet
exclaims:--

"Ah, all the tongues which the Muses have inspired could not tell the
thousandth part of the beauty of the smile of Beatrice as she presented
me to the celestial group, exclaiming, 'Thou art redeemed!' O woman, in
whom lives all my hope, who hast deigned to leave for my salvation thy
footsteps on the throne of the Eternal, thou hast redeemed me from
slavery to liberty; now earth has no more dangers for me. I cherish the
image of thy purity in my bosom, that in my last hour, acceptable in
thine eyes, my soul may leave my body."

Thus did Dante impersonate the worship of Venus Urania,--spiritual
tenderness overcoming sensual desire. Thus faithful to the traditions of
this great poet did the austere Michael Angelo do reverence to the
virtues of Vittoria Colonna. Thus did the lofty Corneille present in his
Pauline a divine model of the love which inspires great deeds and
accompanies great virtues. Thus did Shakspeare, in his portrait of
Portia, show the blended generosity and simplicity of a woman's soul:--

"For you [my Lord Bassanio]
I would be trebled twenty times myself;
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich;"

or, in his still more beautiful delineation of Juliet, paint an
absorbing devotion:--

"My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite."

Thus did Milton, in his transcendent epic, show how a Paradise was
regained when woman gave her generous sympathy to man, and reproduced
for all coming ages the image of Spiritual Love,--the inamorata of Dante
and Petrarch, the inspired and consoling guide.

But the muse of the poets, even when sanctified by Christianity, never
sang such an immortal love as the Middle Ages in sober prose have handed
down in the history of Heloise,--the struggle between the two Venuses of
Socrates, and the final victory of Urania, though not till after the
temporary triumph of Polyhymnia,--the inamorata of earth clad in the
vestments of a sanctified recluse, and purified by