“Joyful seemed Love, and he was keeping
     My heart within his hands, while on his arm
     He held my Lady, covered o’er and sleeping.

  “Then waking her, he with this flaming heart
     Did humbly feed her, fearful of some harm. 
     Sudden I saw him weep, and quick depart.”

This sonnet is somewhat obscure in the details of its meaning, and has little beauty, but it is of interest as being the earliest poetic composition by Dante that has been preserved for us, and it is curious as being the account of a vision.  In our previous article on the “New Life,” we referred to the fact of this book being in great part composed of the account of a series of visions, thus connecting itself in the form of its imaginations with the great work of Dante’s later years.  As a description of things unseen except by the inward eye, this sonnet is bound in poetic connection to the nobler visions of the “Divina Commedia.”  The private stamp of Dante’s imagination is indelibly impressed upon it.

He tells us that many answers were made to this sonnet, and “among those who replied to it was he whom I call the first of my friends, and he wrote a sonnet which began,

  ‘Thou seest in my opinion every worth.’

This was, as it were, the beginning of our friendship when he knew that it was I who had sent these verses to him.”  This first of Dante’s friends was Guido Cavalcanti.  Their friendship was of long duration, beginning thus in Dante’s nineteenth year, and ending only with Guido’s death, in 1300, when Dante was thirty-five years old.  It may be taken as a proof of its intimacy and of Dante’s high regard for the genius of his friend, that, when Dante, in his course through Hell, at Easter in 1300, represents himself as being recognized by the father of Guido, the first words of the old man to him are,

“If through this blind prison thou goest through loftiness of soul, where is my son? oh, why is he not with thee?"[E]

[Footnote E:  Inferno, x. 58-60.]

The sonnet of Guido, in reply to that sent him by Dante, has been preserved, together with the replies by two other contemporary poets; but Dante says of them all,—­“The true meaning of my sonnet was not then seen by any one, though now it is plain to the simplest.”

After this vision, the poet, whose soul was wholly devoted to his most gentle lady, was brought by Love into so frail a condition of health, that his friends became anxious for him, and questioned him about that which he most wished to conceal.  Then he told them that it was Love which had brought him to this pass.  But when they asked him, “For whom has Love thus wasted thee?” he looked at them smiling, and said nothing.