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Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin
page 58 of 155 (37%)
take patience in hearing of their unmerited success.

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is the
woman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never,
by any chance, the youth who watches over, or educates, his
mistress.

Next take, though more briefly, graver testimony--that of the great
Italians and Greeks. You know well the plan of Dante's great poem--
that it is a love-poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for her
watch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yet
saves him from destruction--saves him from hell. He is going
eternally astray in despair; she comes down from heaven to his help,
and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, interpreting
for him the most difficult truths, divine and human; and leading
him, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star.

I do not insist upon Dante's conception; if I began I could not
cease: besides, you might think this a wild imagination of one
poet's heart. So I will rather read to you a few verses of the
deliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to his living lady, wholly
characteristic of the feeling of all the noblest men of the
thirteenth, or early fourteenth, century, preserved among many other
such records of knightly honour and love, which Dante Rossetti has
gathered for us from among the early Italian poets.


"For lo! thy law is passed
That this my love should manifestly be
To serve and honour thee:
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