door, astounded at the words he had just heard. Guido pushed open a
low portal leading to the Cloisters, followed the Cloister wall, and
arrived in the Library, where Fra Sisto was painting the figures of
angels. There, after saluting the good Brother, he drew out from a
great painted chest one of the books newly come from Constantinople,
laid it on a desk and began to turn over the leaves. It was a
Treatise on Love, writ in Greek by the divine Plato. Messer Guido
sighed; his hands began to tremble and his eyes filled with tears.

"Alas!" he muttered; "hid beneath these signs is the Light, and I cannot
see it."

He said thus to himself, because the knowledge of the Greek tongue was
then altogether lost in the West. After many a long-drawn groan, he took
the book, and kissing it, laid it in the iron chest like a beautiful
dead woman in her coffin. Then he asked the good Fra Sisto to give him
the Manuscript of the Speeches of Cicero, which he read, till the shades
of evening, glooming down on the cypresses in the Cloister garden,
spread their batlike wings over the pages of his book. For you must know
Messer Guido Cavalcanti was a searcher after truth in the writings of
the Ancients, and was for treading the arduous ways that lead mankind to
immortality. Devoured by the noble longing of discovery, he would set
out in canzones the doctrines of the old-world Sages concerning Love
which is the path to Virtue.

A few days later, Messer Betto Brunelleschi came to visit him at his own
house on the promenade of the Adimari, at the peep of day, the hour when
the lark sings in the corn. He found him still abed, and after kissing
him, said tenderly: