“Tell her,—­’O Lady, this his heart is stayed
  On faithfulness so sure and firm,
  Save to serve you it has no other care: 
  Early ‘twas yours, and never has it strayed.’ 
  But if she trust not what thou dost affirm,
  Tell her to ask of Love, who will the truth declare;
  And at the end, beg her, with humble prayer,
  That she her pardon of its wrong would give;
  Then let her bid that I no longer live,
  And she shall see her servant quick obey."[H]

[Footnote H:  Compare Canz. x. and xi.]

After this poem was finished, Dante describes what he calls “a battle of thoughts” concerning Love within his mind, and then goes on to relate that it happened one day that he was taken, by a friend who thought to give him pleasure, to a feast at which many ladies were present.  “They were assembled,” he says, “to attend a lady who was married that day, and, according to the custom of the city, they bore her company at her first sitting at table in the dwelling of her new husband.”  Dante, believing thus to do pleasure to his friend, proposed to stand in waiting upon these ladies.  But at the moment of this intention he felt a sudden tremor, which caused him to lean for support against a painting which ran round the wall,[I] and, raising his eyes, he beheld Beatrice.  His confusion became apparent; and the ladies, not excepting Beatrice herself, laughed at his strange appearance.  Then his friend took him from their presence, and having asked him what so ailed him, Dante replied, “I have set my feet on that edge of life beyond which no man can go with intent to return.”  Then leaving him, he went to the chamber of tears, weeping and ashamed; and in his trouble he wrote a sonnet to Beatrice, in which he says, that, if she had known the cause of his trouble, he believes that she would have felt pity for him.[J]

[Footnote I:  This is, perhaps, the earliest reference in modern literature to the use of painting as a decoration for houses.  It is probable that it was a recent application of the art, and resulted from the revival of interest in its works which accompanied the revival of the art.  We shall have occasion again to note a reference to painting.]

[Footnote J:  To this period, apparently, belong Sonnets xxix. and xxx. of the general collection.  The last may not unlikely have been omitted in the Vita Nuova on account of the tenderness with which the death of Beatrice had invested every memory of her, preventing the insertion of a poem which might seem harsh in its expression:—­

  “I curse the day on which I first beheld
  The light of thy betraying eyes.”
]