best to destroy her," as Voltaire says, it would be beyond our province
to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as events are when we look back
on them across so many ages, only the upheavals of party conflict
catching the eye, while the spaces of peace between sink out of the view
of history, a whole century seems like a mere wild chaos. Yet during a
couple of such centuries the cathedrals of Florence, Pisa, and Siena got
built; Cimabue, Giotto, Arnolfo, the Pisani, Brunelleschi, and Ghiberti
gave the impulse to modern art, or brought it in some of its branches to
its culminating point; modern literature took its rise; commerce became a
science, and the middle class came into being. It was a time of fierce
passions and sudden tragedies, of picturesque transitions and contrasts.
It found Dante, shaped him by every experience that life is capable
of,--rank, ease, love, study, affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger,
dependence, despair,--until he became endowed with a sense of the
nothingness of this world's goods possible only to the rich, and a
knowledge of man possible only to the poor. The few well-ascertained
facts of Dante's life may be briefly stated. In 1274 occurred what we may
call his spiritual birth, the awakening in him of the imaginative
faculty, and of that profounder and more intense consciousness which
springs from the recognition of beauty through the antithesis of sex. It
was in that year that he first saw Beatrice Portinari. In 1289 he was
present at the battle of Campaldino, fighting on the side of the Guelphs,
who there utterly routed the Ghibellines, and where, he says
characteristically enough, "I was present, not a boy in arms, and where I
felt much fear, but in the end the greatest pleasure, from the various
changes of the fight."[18] In the same year he assisted at the siege and
capture of Caprona.[19] In 1290 died Beatrice, married to Simone dei
Bardi, precisely when is uncertain, but before 1287, as appears by a
mention of her in her father's will, bearing date January 15 of that
year. Dante's own marriage is assigned to various years, ranging from