In the great and hard-fought battle of Campaldino Dante himself took part.  “I was at first greatly afraid,” he says, in a letter of which but a few sentences have been preserved,[A]—­“but at the end I felt the greatest joy,—­according to the various chances of the battle.”  When the victorious army returned to Florence, a splendid procession, with the clergy at its head, with the arts of the city each under its banner, and with all manner of pomp, went out to meet it.  There were long-continued feasts and rejoicings.  The battle had been fought on the 11th of June, the day of St. Barnabas, and the Republic, though already engaged in magnificent works of church-building, decreed that a new church should be erected in honor of the Saint on whose day the victory had been won.

[Footnote A:  See Lionardo Aretino’s Vita di Dante.]

A little later in that summer, Dante was one of a troop of Florentines who joined the forces of Lucca in levying war upon the Pisan territory.  The stronghold of Caprona was taken, and Dante was present at its capture; for he says, (Inferno, xxi. 94-96,) “I saw the foot-soldiers, who, having made terms, came out from Caprona, afraid when they beheld themselves among so many enemies."[B]

[Footnote B:  Landino, and most of the commentators after him, state that Dante refers in this passage to the fear of the garrison taken in the place when it was recaptured the next year by the Pisans.  But as Florence and Pisa continued at desperate enmity, Dante could hardly have witnessed this latter scene.]

Thus, during a great part of the summer of 1289, Dante was in active service as a soldier.  He was no lovesick idler, no mere home-keeping writer of verses, but was already taking his part in the affairs of the state which he was afterwards to be called on for a time to assist in governing, and he was laying up those stores of experience which were to serve as the material out of which his vivifying imagination was to form the great national poem of Italy.  But of this active life, of these personal engagements, of these terrible events which took such strong possession of his soul, there is no word, no suggestion even, in the book of his “New Life.”  In it there is no echo, however faint, of those storms of public violence and private passion which broke dark over Italy.  In the midst of the tumults which sprang from the jealousies of rival states, from the internal discords of cities, from the divisions of parties, from the bitterness of domestic quarrels,—­this little book is full of tenderness and peace, and tells its story of love as if the world were the abode of tranquillity.  No external excitements could break into the inner chambers of Dante’s heart to displace the love that dwelt within them.  The contrast between the purity and the serenity of the “Vita Nuova” and the coarseness and cruelty of the deeds that were going on while it was being written is complete.  Every man in some sort leads a double life,—­one real and his own, the other seeming and the world’s,—­but with few is the separation so entire as it was with Dante.