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