branches, were all busying themselves for me in weaving the web of the
poem I wanted to carry home with me.

As I shot the bright verses this way and that way, and caught with a
childish pleasure at the shining rhymes as a child will catch at some
glittering toy, I had perforce to smile as I reflected on what a
different business mine was to that of the unknown singer of those
days. For those poems of his that he had sent to Guido and to others
were exceeding beautiful, and full of a very noble and golden
exaltation. I think if the angels in heaven were ever to make love to
one another they would choose for their purpose some such perfection of
speech as Dante--for I knew the singer to be Dante a little later--found
for his sonnets and canzone. For myself, I frankly admit, being an
honest man, that I could not write such sonnets even if I had my Dante's
command of speech, to which Heaven forbid that I should ever pretend.
Those rhymes of his, for all their loveliness--and when I say that they
were lovely enough to be worthy of the lady to whom they were addressed,
I give them the highest praise and the praise that Dante would most have
cared to accept--were too ethereal for my work-a-day humors. I liked
better to write verses to the laughing, facile lasses with whom my way
of life was cast--jolly girls who would kiss to-day and sigh to-morrow,
and forget all about you the third day if needs were, and whom it was as
easy for their lover to forget, so far as any sense of pain lay in the
recollection of their graces. And I would even rather have the jolly job
I was engaged on at that moment of some ripe, rich-colored verses for
Vittoria, for I could, in writing them, be as human as I pleased and
frankly of the earth earthly, and I needed to approach my quarry with
no tributes pilfered from the armory of heaven. I could praise her
beauty with the tongue of men, and leave the tongue of angels out of the
question; and if my muse were pleased here and there to take a wanton
flutter, I knew I could give decorum the go-by with a light heart.

So I wallowed at my ease in the grasses and tossed verses as a juggler
tosses his balls, and watched them glitter and wink as they rose and
fell, and at last I shaped to my own satisfaction what I believed to be
an exceedingly pleasant set of verses that needed no more than to be
engrossed on a fair piece of sheepskin and tied with a bright ribbon and
sent to the exquisite frailty. And all