The lover has a foreboding of the fate awaiting him:  “I have set my feet into that phase of life from whence there is no return.”  He divines the sorrow to which love has predestined him.  But others, too, divining that this man “expects more, perhaps, of love than others,” ask him to explain to them the essence of love, and he answers them with the famous sonnet: 

     Amor e cor gentil sono una cosa
     (Love and the gentle heart are but one thing.)

The death of Beatrice is accompanied by the same phenomena as was the death of Christ:  the sun lost its brilliance, stars appeared in the sky, birds fell to the ground, dead, the earth trembled; God visibly intervened in the course of nature.

     For from the lamp of her meek lowlihead
     Such an exceeding glory went up hence,
     That it woke wonder in the Eternal Sire,
     Until a sweet desire
     Entered Him for that lovely excellence,
     So that He bade her to Himself aspire;
     Counting this weary and most evil place
     Unworthy of a thing so full of grace.

(Transl. by D.G.  ROSSETTI.)

In the 29th chapter, which we, to-day, do not readily understand, Dante established by a system of symbolical numbers a connection between Beatrice and the Trinity; the deification of the beloved had been achieved in thought and emotion, religion enriched by a new divinity.  “Love, weeping, has filled my heart with new knowledge,” he says, at the conclusion of the work of his youth.  I repeat what I have already said in another place, and supported by passages from the Divine Comedy:  It was never Dante’s intention to write fictitious poems in our meaning of the term, but at every hour of his life he was convinced that he was proclaiming the pure truth; he knew himself to be the chosen vehicle for the interpretation of the eternal system of the world.

At the conclusion of the Vita Nuova, Beatrice is a divine being, devoid of all emotion—­enthroned in Heaven; in the Comedy she becomes her lover’s saviour and redeemer, and through him a helper of all humanity.  The love of the youth had found no response in the heart of the Florentine maiden, but the soul of the glorified woman was inspired by love of him.  She trembles for him, and when Mary’s messenger admonishes her:  “Why doest thou not help him who has loved thee so much?” she sends Virgil to him as a guide and finally herself leads her redeemed lover to God.  Now she responds to his love; she has even wept for him.  This ultimately fulfilled, but always chastely hidden longing for love in return, gives the woman-worship of Dante a peculiarly noble charm.  At the end of his journey through life he prays to her, who has again disappeared from his sight, and his last confession is:  “Into a free man thou transform’st a slave.”

Love’s greatest miracle has been made manifest in him; it has transfigured and purified him, and made of the slave of the world and its desires, a personality—­the fundamental motif of love.