and doubts, its exaltations and despairs, its sudden
interruption and transformation by death, is the story which the "Vita
Nuova" tells. The narrative is quaint, embroidered with conceits,
deficient in artistic completeness, but it has the _naivete_ and
simplicity of youth, the charm of sincerity, the freedom of personal
confidence; and so long as there are lovers in the world, so long as
lovers are poets, so long will this first and tenderest love-story of
modern literature be read with appreciation and responsive sympathy.

But "The New Life" has an interest of another sort, and a claim, not
yet sufficiently acknowledged, upon all who would read the "Divina
Commedia" with fit appreciation, in that it contains the first hint of
the great poem itself, and furnishes for it a special, interior,
imaginative introduction, without the knowledge of which it is not
thoroughly to be understood. The character of Beatrice, as she appears
in the "Divina Commedia," the relation in which the poet stands to her,
the motive of the dedication of the poem to her honor and memory, and
many minor allusions, are all explained or illustrated by the aid of
the "Vita Nuova." Dante's works and life are interwoven as are those of
no other of the poets who have written for all time. No other has so
written his autobiography. With Dante, external impressions and
internal experiences--sights, actions, thoughts, emotions,
sufferings--were all fused into poetry as they passed into his soul.
Practical life and imaginative life were with him one and indissoluble.
Not only was the life of imagination as real to him as the life of
fact, but the life of fact was clothed upon by that of imagination; so
that, on the one hand, daily events and common circumstances became a
part of his spiritual experience in a far more intimate sense than is
the case with other men, while, on the other, his fancies and his
visions assumed the absoluteness and the literal existence of positive
external facts. The remotest flights of his imagination never carry him
where his sight becomes dim. His journey through the spiritual world
was no less real to him than his journeys between Florence and Rome, or
his wanderings between Verona and Ravenna. So absolute was his
imagination, that it often so far controls his reader as to make it
difficult not to believe that the poet beheld with his mortal eyes the
invisible scenes which he describes. Boccaccio relates, that, after
that