Now on it's way the second quarter came

Of those twelve hours, wherein the stars are bright, When Love was seen before me, in such might, As to remember shakes with awe my frame. Suddenly came he, seeming glad, and keeping My heart in hand; and in his arms he had My Lady in a folded garment sleeping: He wak'd her; and that heart all burning bade Her feed upon, in lowly guise and sad ;

Then from my view he turn'd; and parted, weeping.

The other sonnet is one that was written after the death of Beatrice :

Ah pilgrims! ye, that, haply musing, go,

On aught save that which on your road ye meet.
From land so distant, tell me, I intreat,

Come ye, as by your mien and looks ye show? Why mourn ye not, as through these gates of woe Ye wend along our city's midmost street,

Even like those who nothing seem to weet What chance hath fall'n, why she is grieving so? If ye to listen but awhile would stay,

Well knows this heart, which inly sigheth sore, That ye would then pass, weeping on your way. Oh hear; her Beatrice is no more;

And words there are a man of her might say, Would make a stranger's eye that loss deplore.

In the Convito, or Banquet, which did not follow till sometime after his banishment, he explains very much at large the sense of three, out of fourteen, of his canzoni, the remainder of which he had intended to open in the same manner. "The viands at his Banquet," he tells his readers, quaintly enough, "will be set out in fourteen different manners; that is, will consist of fourteen canzoni, the materials of which are love and virtue. Without the present

bread, they would not be free from some shade of obscurity, so as to be prized by many, less for their usefulness than for their beauty; but the bread will, in the form of the present exposition, be that light, which will bring forth all their colours, and display their true meaning to the view. And if the present work, which is named a Banquet, and I wish may prove so, be handled after a more manly guise than the Vita Nuova, I intend not, therefore, that the former should in any part derogate from the latter, but that the one should be a help to the other: seeing that it is fitting in reason for this to be fervid and impassioned; that, temperate and manly. For it becomes us to act and speak otherwise at one age than at another; since at one age, certain manners are suitable and praise-worthy, which, at another, become disproportionate and blameable." He then apologizes for speaking of himself. "I fear the disgrace," says he, " of having been subject to so much passion, as one, reading these canzoni, may conceive me to have been; a disgrace, that is removed by my speaking thus unreservedly of myself, which shows not passion, but virtue, to have been the moving cause. I intend, moreover, to set forth their true meaning, which some may not perceive, if I declare it not." He next proceeds to give many reasons why his commentary was not written rather in Latin, than in Italian; for which, if no excuse be now thought necessary, it must be recollected that the Italian language was then in its infancy, and scarce supposed to possess dignity enough for the purposes of instruction. "The Latin," he allows, "would have explained his canzoni better to foreigners, as to the Germans, the English, and others; but then it must have expounded their sense, without the power of, at the same time, transferring their beat

ty:" and he soon after tells us that many noble persons of both sexes were ignorant of the learned language. The best cause, however, which he assigns for this preference, was his natural love of his native tongue, and the desire he felt to exalt it above the Provençal, which by many was said to be the more beautiful and perfect language; and against such of his countrymen as maintained so unpatriotic an opinion, he inveighs with much warmth.

In his exposition of the first canzoni of the three, he tells his reader, that "the Lady, of whom he was enamoured after his first love, was that most beauteous and honourable daughter of the Emperor of the universe, to whom Pythagoras gave the name of Philosophy :" and he applies the same title to the object of his affections, when he is commenting on the other two.

The purport of his third canzone, which is less mysterious, and, therefore, perhaps more likely to please than the others, is to show that "virtue only is true nobility." Towards the conclusion, after having spoken of virtue itself, much as Pindar would have spoken of it, as being "the gift of God only:" Che solo Iddio all' anima la dona,

he thus describes it as acting throughout the several stages of life.

L'anima, cui adorna, &c.

The soul, that goodness like to this adorns,

Holdeth it not conceal'd;

But, from her first espousal to the frame,
Shows it, till death, reveal'd,

Obedient, sweet, and full of seemly shame,
She, in the primal age,

The person decks with beauty; moulding it
Fitly through every part.

VOL. XLV.

C

In riper manhood, temperate, firm of heart,
With love replenish'd, and with courteous praise,
In loyal deeds alone she hath delight.
And, in her elder days,

For prudent and just largeness is she known;
Rejoicing with herself,

That wisdom in her staid discourse be shown.
Then, in life's fourth division, at the last

She weds with God again,

Contemplating the end she shall attain;
And looketh back; and blesseth the time past.

His lyric poems, indeed, generally stand much in need of a comment to explain them; but the difficulty arises rather from the thoughts themselves, than from any imperfection of the language in which those thoughts are conveyed. Yet they abound not only in deep moral reflections, but in touches of tenderness and passion.

Some, it has been already intimated, have supposed that Beatrice was only a creature of Dante's imagination; and there can be no question but that he has invested her, in the Divina Cammedia, with the attributes of an allegorical being. But who can doubt of her having had a real existence, when she is spoken of in such a stream of passion as in these lines?

Quel ch' ella par, quando un poco sorride,
Non si può dicer ne tenere a mente,

Siè nuovo miracolo e gentile.

Mira che quando ride

Vita Nuova.

Passa ben di dolcezza ogni altra cosa.

Canz. XV.

The canzone, from which the last couplet is taken,

presents a portrait which might well supply a painter with a far more exalted idea of female beauty, than he could form to himself from the celebrated Ode of Anacreon on a similar subject. After a minute description of those parts of her form, which the garments of a modest woman would suffer to be seen, he raises the whole by the superaddition of a moral grace and dignity, such as the Christian religion alone could supply, and such as the pencil of Raphael afterwards aimed to represent.

Umile vergognosa e temperata,
E sempre a vertù grata,

Intra suoi be' costumi un atto regna,
Che d'ogni riverenza la fa degna.*

One or two of the sonnets prove that he could at times condescend to sportiveness and pleasantry. The following to Brunetto, I should conjecture to have been sent with his Vita Nuova, which was written the year before Brunetto died.

Master Brunetto, this I send, entreating

Ye'll entertain this lass of mine at Easter;
She does not come among you as a feaster;
No: she has need of reading, not of eating.
Nor let her find you at some merry meeting,

Laughing amidst buffoons and drollers, lest her
Wise sentence should escape a noisy jester:
She must be wooed, and is well worth the weet-
ing.

If in this sort you fail to make her out,

You have amongst you many sapient men,
All famous as was Albert of Cologne.

I have been pos'd amid that learned rout.

And if they cannot spell her right, why then
Call Master Giano, and the deed is done.

*I am aware that this canzone is not ascribed to Dante, in the collection of Sonetti e Canzoni printed by the Gianti in 1527.