new style” is scarcely heard,—­and others, of a later period, in which the accustomed metaphysical and fanciful subtilties of the elder poets are drawn out to an unwonted fineness.  These were concessions to a ruling mode,—­concessions the more readily made, owing to their being in complete harmony with the strong subtilizing and allegorizing tendencies of Dante’s own mind.  Still, so far as he adopts the modes of his predecessors in this first book of his, Dante surpasses them all in their own way.  He leaves them far behind him, and goes forward to open new paths which he is to tread alone.

But there is yet another tendency of the times, to which Dante, in his later works, has given the fullest and most characteristic expression, and which exhibits itself curiously in the “Vita Nuova.”  Corresponding with the new ardor for the arts, and in sympathy with it, was a newly awakened and generally diffused ardor for learning, especially for the various branches of philosophy.  Science was leaving the cloister, in which she had sat in dumb solitude, and coming out into the world.  But the limits and divisions of knowledge were not firmly marked.  The relations of learning to life were not clearly understood.  The science of mathematics was not yet so advanced as to bind philosophy to exactness.  The intellects of men were quickened by a new sense of freedom, and stimulated by ardor of imagination.  New worlds of undiscovered knowledge loomed vaguely along the horizon.  Philosophy invaded the sphere of poetry, while, on the other hand, poetry gave its form to much of the prevailing philosophy.  To be a proper poet was not only to be a writer of verses, but to be a master of learning.  Boccaccio describes Guido Cavalcanti as “one of the best logicians in the world, and as a most excellent natural philosopher,"[10] but says nothing of his poetry.  Dante, more than any other man of his time, resumed in himself the general zeal for knowledge.  His genius had two distinct, and yet often intermingling parts,—­the poetic and the scientific.  No learning came amiss to him.  He was born a scholar, as he was born a poet,—­and had he written not a single poem, he would still be famous as the most profound student of his times.  Far as he surpassed his contemporaries in poetry, he was no less their superior in the depth and the extent of his knowledge.  And this double nature of his genius is plainly shown in many parts of “The New Life.”  A youthful incapacity to mark clearly the line between the work of the student and the work of the poet is manifest in it.  The display of his acquisitions is curiously mingled with the narrative of his emotions.  This is not to be charged against him as pedantry.  His love of learning partook of the nature of passion; his judgment was not yet able, if indeed it ever became able, to establish the division between the abstractions of the intellect and the affections of the heart.  And above all, his early claim of honor as a poet was to be justified by his possession of the fruits of study.