ission, if it so pleased me, to take a
copy. This, indeed, I should have done, but being, as I always have
been, a lazy knave, I neglected to do, thinking that any time would
serve as well as the present, and being, as I fear, entangled in some
pleasant pastime with a light o' love or two that interfered with such
serious interests as I owned in life, and of which certainly none should
have been more serious than any matter concerning my dear friend and
poet. Then, when it was too late for me to amend my error, came Messer
Guido's death, and no man knows now what became of those verses.

As for me, I cannot remember them, try I never so hard to cudgel my
brains for their meaning and sequence. Sometimes, indeed, at night, in
sleep, I seem to see them plain and staring before me on a smooth page
of parchment, every word clear, every rhyme legible, the beautiful
thoughts set forth in a beautiful hand of write; but when I wake they
have all vanished. Sometimes on an evening of late summer, when the
winds are blowing softly through the roses and filling the air with
odors almost unbearably sweet, it seems to me as if the sweet voices of
lovers were chanting those lines, and that I have only to listen
heedfully to have them for my own again. But it is all in vain that I
try to remember them to any profit. A few phrases buzz in my own brains,
but they are no more than phrases, such as I, or any man that was at all
nimble in the spinning of words, might use about love and a sweet lady,
and there are not enough of them left to build up again the noble
structure of so splendid a vision.

Well, as I say, Messer Dante, having quitted the festivity, made his way
into the garden, where he lingered a little while. Then it seemed to him
that the God of Love appeared to him in the same form as before, only
more glorious, and bade him follow, and he went, guided, as it seemed to
him, ever by that strange and luminous presence through this path and
that path, till he came to the appointed staircase and climbed it,
following ever the winged feet of Love. When he came to the top of the
stairway he passed through a little door on to the open, moon-drenched
loggia, and straightway his first thought was that he beheld the stars,
seeing that they seemed to him to shine so very brightly in heaven after
the blackness of the darkness through which he had passed. And I think
it must be some memory of that night which has made him thrice record
wit