Volume 1

Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal / [Anon].

Date:
1835-1837
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    looked, how she spoke, how she stepped, and how her hero felt, — growing at every instant greater and better, and braver in his own esteem, that he might become worthy of hers : — suffice it to say, from Boccaccio, that Dante, though but a boy, received her beautiful image into his heart with such fondness of affection, that, from that day, it never departed thence. In his “ Vita Nuova” (a romantic and sentimental retrospect of his youth), he has himself described his raptures and his agonies in the commencement and progress of this passion; which was not extinguished, but refined ; not buried with her body, but translated with its object, (her soul,) when Beatrice died, in 1290, at the age of twenty-four years. Judging from the general tenour of his poetry, of which his mistress was at once the inspirer and the theme, it must be presumed that the lady returned his noble attachment with corresponding tenderness and delicacy; though why they were not united by marriage has never been told. He intimates, indeed, that it was long before he could learn, by any token from herself, that his faithful passion was not hopeless. As usual in cases of this kind, a most unpoetical accident has been ill- naturedly interposed, by truth or tradition, to spoil a charm almost too exquisite to be more than a charm which the breath of five words might break. On the evidence of a marriage certificate, which Time unluckily dropped in his flight, and some poring antiquary picked up a century or two afterwards, it seems as though Beatrice became the wife of a cavalier de Bardi. Dante himself, however (who pretends to no bosom-secrets too dark to be uttered), never alludes to such a blight of his prospects on this side of that threefold world which he was afterwards privileged to explore, at her spontaneous intercession, that he might be purged from every baser flame than entire affection to herself, while she gave him in the eighth heaven a heart divided only with her God. After her decease, he intimates that he was tempted to infidelity to her memory (in which she was B 4
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