Never didst thou spy In art or nature aught so passing sweet As were the limbs that in their beauteous frame And she rebukes him, for that he could stoop from the memory of her love to be the thrall of a slight girl. This last expression is supposed to allude either to Dante's unfortunate marriage with Gemma Donati,* or to the attachment he formed during his exile for a beautiful Lucchese named Gentucca, the subject of several of his poems. But, notwithstanding all this severity of censure, Dante gazing on his divine monitress, is so rapt by her loveliness, his eyes so eager to recompense themselves for "their ten years' thirst,” (Beatrice had been dead ten years,) that not being yet freed from the stain of his earthly nature, he is warned not to gaze "too fixedly" on her charms. After a farther probation, Beatrice introduces him into the various spheres which compose the celestial paradise; and thenceforward she certainly assumes the characteristics of an allegorical being. The true distinction seems this, that Dante has not represented Divine Wisdom under the name and form of Beatrice, but * This marriage was one of policy, and negotiated by the friends of Dante and of Gemma Donati: her temper was violent and harsh, and their domestic peace was, probably, not increased by Dante's obstinate regret for his first love. the more to exalt his Beatrice, he has clothed her in the attributes of Divine Wisdom. She at length ascends with him into the Heaven of Heavens, to the source of eternal and uncreated light, without shadow and without bound; and when Dante looks round for her, he finds she has quitted his side, and has taken her place throned among the supreme blessed, "as far above him as the region of thunder is above the centre of the sea; "he gazes up at her in a rapture of love and devotion, and in a sublime apostrophe invokes her still to continue her favor towards him. She looks down upon him from her effulgent height, smiles on him with celestial sweetness, and then fixing her eyes on the eternal fountain of glory, is absorbed in ecstasy. Here we leave her; the poet had touched the limits of permitted thought; the serapa wings of imagination, borne upwards by the inspiration of deep love, could no higher soar,-the audacity of genius could dare no farther! * Dante died at Ravenna in 1321, and was sumptuously interred at the cost of Guido da Polenta, the father of that unfortunate Francesca di Rimini, whose story he has so exquisitely told in the fifth canto of the Inferno. He left several sons and an only daughter, whom he had named Beatrice, in remembrance of his early love: she became a nun at Ravenna. Now where, in the name of all truth and all feeling, were the heads, or rather the hearts, of those commentators, who could see nothing in the Beatrice thus beautifully portrayed, thus tenderly lamented, and thus sublimely commemorated, but a mere allegorical personage, the creation of a poet's fancy? Nothing can come of nothing; and it was no unreal or imaginary being who turned the course of Dante's ardent passions and active spirit, and burning enthusiasm, into one sweeping torrent of love and poetry, and gave to Italy and to the world the Divina Commedia ! CHAPTER X. CHAUCER AND PHILIPPA PICARD. AFTER Italy, England,-who has ever trod in her footsteps, and at length outstripped her in the race of intellect,―was the next to produce a great and prevailing genius in poetry, a master spirit, whom no change of customs, manners, or language can render wholly obsolete; and who was destined, like the rest of his tribe, to bow before the influence of woman, to toil in her praise, and soar by her inspiration. Seven years after the death of Dante, Chaucer was born, and he was twenty-four years younger than Petrarch, whom he met at Padua in 1373; this meeting between the two great poets was memorable in itself, and yet more interesting for having first introduced into the English language that beautiful monument to the virtue of women,the story of Griselda. Boccaccio had lately sent to his friend the MS. of the Decamerone, of which it is the concluding tale: the tender fancy of Petrarch, refined by a forty years' attachment to a gentle and elegant female, passed over what was vicious and blamable, or only recommended by the wit and the style, and fixed with delight on the tale of Griselda; so beautiful in itself, and so honorable to the sex whom he had poetically deified in the person of one lovely woman. He amused his leisure hours in translating it into Latin, and having finished his version, he placed it in the hands of a citizen of Padua, and desired him to read it aloud. His friend accordingly began; but as he proceeded, the overpowering pathos of the story so affected him, that he was obliged to stop; he began again, but was unable to proceed; the gathering tears blinded him, and choked his voice, and he threw down the manuscript. This incident, which Petrarch himself relates in a letter to Boccaccio, occurred about the period when Chaucer passed from Genoa to l'adua to visit the poet and lover of Laura Quel grande, alla cui fama angusto è il mondo. Petrarch must have regarded the English poet with that wondering, enthusiastic admiration with which we should now hail a Milton or a Shakspeare sprung from Otaheite or Nova Zembla; and his heart and soul being naturally occupied by his latest work, he repeated the experiment he had before tried on his Paduan friend. The impres sion which the Griselda produced upon the vivid, susceptible imagination of Chaucer, may be judged from his own beautiful version of it in the Canterbury Tales; where the barbarity and improbability of the incidents are so redeemed by the pervading truth and purity and tenderness of the sentiment, that I suppose it never was perused for the first time without tears. Chaucer, as if proud of his interview with Petrarch, and anxious to publish it, is careful to tell us that he did not derive the story from Boccaccio, but that it was Learned at Padua of a worthy clerk, which is also proved by internal evidence. Chaucer so far resembled Petrarch, that, like him, he was at once poet, scholar, courtier, statesman, philosopher, and man of the world; but considered merely as poets, they were the very antipodes of each other. The genius of Dante has been compared to a Gothic cathedral, vast and lofty, and dark and irregular. In the same spirit, Petrarch may be likened to a classical and elegant Greek temple, rising aloft in its fair and faultless proportions, and compacted of the purest Parian |