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.