It is recorded and attested, even by Dante himself, that at the early age of nine he fell in love with Beatrice,—­a little girl of one of his neighbors,—­and that he wrote to her sonnets as the mistress of his devotion.  How could he have written sonnets without an inspiration, unless he felt sentiments higher than we associate with either boys or girls?  The boy was father of the man.  “She appeared to me,” says the poet, “at a festival, dressed in that most noble and honorable color, scarlet,—­girded and ornamented in a manner suitable to her age; and from that moment love ruled my soul.  And after many days had passed, it happened that, passing through the street, she turned her eyes to the spot where I stood, and with ineffable courtesy she greeted me; and this had such an effect on me that it seemed I had reached the furthest limit of blessedness.  I took refuge in the solitude of my chamber; and, thinking over what had happened to me, I proposed to write a sonnet, since I had already acquired the art of putting words into rhyme,” This, from his “Vita Nuova,” his first work, relating to the “new life” which this love awoke in his young soul.

Thus, according to Dante’s own statement, was the seed of a never-ending passion planted in his soul,—­the small beginning, so insignificant to cynical eyes, that it would almost seem preposterous to allude to it; as if this fancy for a little girl in scarlet, and in a boy but nine years of age, could ripen into anything worthy to be soberly mentioned by a grave and earnest poet, in the full maturity of his genius,—­worthy to give direction to his lofty intellect, worthy to be the occasion of the greatest poem the world has seen from Homer to modern times.  Absurd! ridiculous!  Great rivers cannot rise from such a spring; tall trees cannot grow from such a little acorn.  Thus reasons the man who does not take cognizance of the mighty mysteries of human life.  If anything tempted the boy to write sonnets to a little girl, it must have been the chivalric element in society at that period, when even boys were required to choose objects of devotion, and to whom they were to be loyal, and whose honor they were bound to defend.  But the grave poet, in the decline of his life, makes this simple confession, as the beginning of that sentiment which never afterwards departed from him, and which inspired him to his grandest efforts.

But this youthful attachment was unfortunate.  Beatrice did not return his passion, and had no conception of its force, and perhaps was not even worthy to call it forth.  She may have been beautiful; she may have been gifted; she may have been commonplace.  It matters little whether she was intellectual or not, beautiful or not.  It was not the flesh and blood he saw, but the image of beauty and loveliness which his own mind created.  He idealized the girl; she was to him all that he fancied.  But she never encouraged him; she denied his greetings, and even avoided his society.  At last she died,