e sun. But
though he could not clearly see where his thought led him, at least he
understood that his thought told of his lady in glory.

"Beyond the sphere that widest orbit hath
Passeth the sigh that issues from my
heart,
While weeping Love doth unto him impart
Intelligence which leads him on his path,

"When at the wished-for place his flight he
stays,
A lady he beholds, in honor dight,
And shining so, that, through her splendid
light,
The pilgrim spirit upon her doth gaze.

"He sees her such that his reporting words
I understand not, for he speaketh low
And strange to the sad heart which makes
him tell;

"He speaketh of that gentle one, I know,
Since oft he Beatrice's name records;
So, ladies dear, I understand him well."

This was the last of the poems which Dante composed in immediate honor
and memory of Beatrice, and is the last of those which he inserted in
the "Vita Nuova." It was not that his love grew cold, or that her image
became faint in his remembrance; but, as he tells us in a few concluding
and memorable words, from this time forward he devoted himself to
preparation for a work in which the earthly Beatrice should have less
part, while the heavenly and blessed spirit of her whom he had loved
should receive more becoming honors. The lover's grief was to find no
more expression; the lamentations for the loss which could never be made
good to him were to cease; the exhibition of a personal sorrow was at an
end. Love and grief, in their double ministry, had refined, enlarged,
and exalted his spirit to the conception of a design unparalleled in its
nature, and of which no intellectual genius, unpurged by suffering, and
impenetrated in its deepest recesses by the spiritualizing heats of
emotion, would have been capable of conceiving. Moreover, as time wore
on, its natural result was gradually to withdraw the poet from the
influence of temporary excitements of feeling, resulting from his
experience of love and death, and to bring him to the contemplation
of life as affected by the presence and the memory of Beatrice in its
eternal and universal relations. He tells us in the "Convito," that,
"after some time, my mind, which neither such consolation as I could
give it, nor that offered to it by others, availed to comfort,
determined to turn to that method by which others in grief had consoled
themselves. And I set myself to read th