must
be that made these miraculous stanzas. I can only plead in my own excuse
that I did not live a generation later than my day, and that I had no
means of divining that a work-a-day friend possessed immortal qualities.
Everybody now in this late evening knows who that poet was, and loves
him. I knew and loved him then, when I had no thought that he was a
poet. Even if it had been given me to make a wild guess at the
authorship of these poems, and my guess had chanced all unwitting to be
right, as would have been thereafter proved, I should have dismissed it
from my fancy. For I conceived that my friend was so busy upon that new
red-hot business of his of fitting himself to be a soldier and use arms,
and answer the taunt of Simone dei Bardi, that he could have no time,
even if he had the desire, of which, as far as I was aware till then,
he had shown no sign, to try his skill on the strings of the muses. You
may be pleased here to remind me of the discourse between Messer
Brunetto Latini and Dante, which I strove to overhear on that May
morning in the Piazza Santa Felicita, to which I will make bold to
answer that I did not truly overhear much at the time, and that the
substance of what I set down was garnered later, both from Dante and
from Messer Brunetto. But even if I had caught sound of those poetical
aspirations of Dante's, I doubt if they would have stuck in my memory.

I suppose it was not for such an idle fellow as I, to whom to do nothing
was ever better than to do--I speak, of course, of any measure of
painful labor, and not of such pleasing pastime as eating or drinking or
loving--to guess how much a great brain and a great heart and a great
purpose could crowd into the narrow compass of a little life. In the
mean time, as I say, these songs and sonnets were blown abroad all over
Florence, and men whispered them to maids, and the men wondered who
wrote the rhymes and the maids wondered for whom they were written.

They would come to us, these rhymes, curiously enough. One or other of
us would find some evening, on his return to his lodging, a scroll of
parchment lying on his table, and on this scroll of parchment some new
verses, and in the corner of the parchment the words in the Latin
tongue, "Take up, read, bear on." And he of us that found himself so
favored, having eagerly taken up and no less eagerly read, would hurry
to the nearest of his comrades and read the new gift to him, delighted,
who would