sorting; but is nourished by its own musings, its dreams, by the sight of her as she passes, her distant salutation, the beauty and glory of her being, unenhanced by any personal contact; and it is told, not to her ear, but in an exquisite confidence and trust in poetic sympathy to those other poet-souls who could understand this rapture of feeling. The dim, sweet vicissitudes of the tale, mystically intimated to us through a twilight of soft allusions, are no sooner experienced than they are woven into verse, to be sent to Guido Cavalcanti and the others of the brotherhood, who stand round in a hush and thrill of sympathetic spectatorship, watching every change of the delicate drama, not always understanding it, puzzled by times, as we are, by the discrepancy between those fantastic passionate refinements and their own ruder realisation of what love is. But there is not a word to imply that Dante ever had the courage to speak of love to Beatrice herself, or to aspire to any return of it from one whom he felt to be so far above him. She knew of it, as women still, in less romantic days, know now and then of the silent devotion of some man, too young, or too poor, or too humble, ever to approach them more nearly. The sentiment is not obsolete, though it has never produced another 'Vita Nuova.' It is love in its highest and most beautiful sense, but it is incompatible with any idea of marrying or asking in marriage; and even the pang with which the lover sees his lady another man's bride, is rather a wounded sense of some lessening of her perfection thereby than the ordinary pangs of jealousy. This is, of course, a sentiment incomprehensible to many minds, but it is not the less a real one on that account.
