Only once, too-only in his opening stanza-does Mr. Woolner directly describe his lady ; I love My Lady: she is very fair: Her brow is wan, and bound by simple hair: Her spirit sits aloof, and high, But glances from her tender eye, In sweetness droopingly. เ Another trait common to all these poems is the anxiety which is expressed lest the love for the dead should decay or grow cold. Dante, in his frank simple way, relates his own experience. Then I perceived a young and very beautiful lady, who was gazing upon me from a window with a gaze full of pity, so that the very sum of pity appeared gathered together in her. ... The sight of this lady brought me into so unwonted a condition that I often thought of her as of one too dear unto me, and I began to consider her thus: "This lady is young, beautiful, gentle, and wise; perchance it was Love himself who set her in my path, that so my life might find peace." And there were times when I thought yet more fondly, until my heart consented unto its reasoning.' Tennyson gives expression to the sentiment in many moods. Alas for Love's transient horizon! Alas for the perishableness of regret! Darkness will not keep her raven gloss. The victor honours can boast, 'This man loved and lost, but all he was is overworn.' Even as our memory fades 'from all the circle of the hills,' so do we forget those who have left us. They are to us as though they had not been. But the poet learns ultimately that he is not to charge himself with wrong done to his friend, although regret 'become an April violet, and bud and blossom with the rest.' God is very good; the earth is very fair; man must not weary his spirit with the burden of a hopeless grief. Nor are love and sorrow the brittle and perishable things they seem to be. They may have ceased to demand expression, but they have grown silent because they have grown into the life. O sorrow, then can sorrow wane? O grief, can grief be changed to less? No-mixt with all this mystic frame, Thus these sad poems do not end sadly. On the contrary, the closing hymn is of victory. We have seen with what resolve Dante closes the Vita Nuova; Beyond the spheres which spread to widest space Guideth it upward the untrodden ways; 'the untrodden ways' which in the Paradiso he was to tread with Beatrice by his side. The modern poet, again, when the flood of his sorrow is spent, finds manifold consolations. It is better, he learns, to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. He experiences in his grief 'a strength reserved.' He has been taught to lift a cry above the conquered years' to one who listens to his cry, to one who works along with him. Nor in truth, though he hears no more the dear, dear voice that I have known,' has death truly divided him from his friend. My love involves the love before; My love is vaster passion now: Though mix'd with God and Nature thou, Far off thou art, but ever nigh; I have thee still, and I rejoice: In these particulars there is, it is obvious, a strong family likeness between the poems of which I have been speaking. But in several respects they differ not less decisively. Dante's insensibility to natural influences is quite as marked as his inaccessibility to spiritual trouble. What a contrast in these respects does he present to the modern poet! Dante does not doubt. The 'something in the world amiss' does not perplex him. Neither he nor his contemporaries entertained any anxiety as to the relations that existed between them and the invisible world; though the vein of irony, the grim humour not devoid of tenderness, that are visible in certain of their Dances of Death, seem to indicate that the men who drew them had been touched sometimes by 'the riddle of the painful earthy.' Death sits by himself, silent, inscrutable, and turns the globe round between his hands,—a fine conception surely. Death carries the infant softly in his arms, takes the crying child by the hand like its mother, cuts the string which ties the blind beggar to his dog. Death shuts up the usurer in his own moneychest; from the beauty who says to him pettishly, 'Don't be so boisterous, you filthy wretch,' he plucks her finery; and the rake, opening his arms for his mistress, clasps death to his heart. The only mortal whom he resolutely neglects is the starving beggar, covered with sores and lying in filth, who vainly implores to be released from his misery. But this sardonic spirit, this wild tenderness and irony, this hard hitting at the destroyer and the life-giver--instrumentum mortis et immortalitatis—do not appear in Dante. The complications of our mortal life do not disquiet him, nor affect his simple reliance on God. There is no trace in any of his poems, least of any in the Vita Nuova, of that moral and intellectual tumult which unsteadies the faith of the modern poet. He has no doubt that heaven is above him, nor any that it is the fit place for his lady. 'Beatrice is gone up into high heaven, the kingdom where the angels are at peace.' When a maiden dies it is because it has pleased the Master of the Angels to call her into his glory. The same words are used when the father of Beatrice is taken. 'Not many days after this (it being the will of the most high God, who also from himself put not away death), the father of wonderful Beatrice, going out of this life, passed certainly into glory.' In the vision of her death he sees the angels bearing her to heaven. 'And I seemed to look towards heaven, and to behold a multitude of angels who were returning upwards, having before them an exceedingly white cloud; and these angels were singing together gloriously, and the words of their song were these:— "Osanna in excelsis," and there was no more that I heard.' Then Beatrice dies. 'I was still occupied with this poem, when the Lord God of Justice called my most gracious lady unto himself, that she might be glorious under the banner of that blessed queen Mary, whose name had always a deep reverence in the words of holy Beatrice.' And then in the closing section of the poem, he relates what he said to the pilgrims who had come to look upon that blessed portraiture bequeathed to us by our Lord Jesus Christ as the image of his blessed countenance, upon which countenance my dear lady now looketh continually.' On this crystal mirror there is no shadow. No breeze ruffles the tranquil surface of the lake. The doubts (if such they can be called) which Dante expresses are of the most harmless kind, and he confesses them with the artless simplicity of a child. He is not quite sure that it is permissible to write about love in the vulgar instead of the Latin tongue, and he attempts elaborately to explain why the number nine' exercised so strong an influence over the life of Beatrice. 'The number three is the root of the number nine; seeing that without the interposition of any other number, being multiplied merely by itself, it produceth nine, as we manifestly perceive that three times three are nine. Thus, three being of itself the efficient of nine, and the Great Efficient of Miracles being of Himself Three Persons (to wit, the Father, the Son, and the Holy |