But this youthful attachment was unfortunate. Beatrice did not
return his passion, and had no conception of its force, and perhaps
was not even worthy to call it forth. She may have been beautiful;
she may have been gifted; she may have been commonplace. It
matters little whether she was intellectual or not, beautiful or
not. It was not the flesh and blood he saw, but the image of
beauty and loveliness which his own mind created. He idealized the
girl; she was to him all that he fancied. But she never encouraged
him; she denied his greetings, and even avoided his society. At
last she died, when he was twenty-seven, and left him--to use his
own expression--"to ruminate on death, and envy whomsoever dies."
To console himself, he read Boethius, and religious philosophy was
ever afterwards his favorite study. Nor did serenity come, so deep
were his sentiments, so powerful was his imagination, until he had
formed an exalted purpose to write a poem in her honor, and worthy
of his love. "If it please Him through whom all things come," said
Dante, "that my life be spared, I hope to tell such things of her
as never before have been seen by any one."

Now what inspired so strange a purpose? Was it a Platonic
sentiment, like the love of Petrarch for Laura, or something that
we cannot explain, and yet real,--a mystery of the soul in its
deepest cravings and aspirations? And is love, among mortals
generally, based on such a foundation? Is it flesh and blood we
love; is it the intellect; is it the character; is it the soul; is
it what is inherently interesting in woman, and which everybody can
see,--the real virtues of the heart and charms of physical beauty?
Or is it what we fancy in the object of our adoration, what exists
already in our own minds,--the archetypes of eternal ideas of