But something more was required in order to write an immortal poem than even native genius, great learning, and profound experience.  The soul must be stimulated to the work by an absorbing and ennobling passion.  This passion Dante had; and it is as memorable as the mortal loves of Abelard and Heloise, and infinitely more exalting, since it was spiritual and immortal,—­even the adoration of his lamented and departed Beatrice.

I wish to dwell for a moment, perhaps longer than to some may seem dignified, on this ideal or sentimental love.  It may seem trivial and unimportant to the eye of youth, or a man of the world, or a woman of sensual nature, or to unthinking fools and butterflies; but it is invested with dignity to one who meditates on the mysteries of the soul, the wonders of our higher nature,—­one of the things which arrest the attention of philosophers.

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.