And as this creation itself is poetry, so its creators were
poets; and language was the instrument of their art: 'Galeotto fu
il libro, e chi lo scrisse.' The Provencal Trouveurs, or inventors,
preceded Petrarch, whose verses are as spells, which unseal the
inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is in the grief of
love. It is impossible to feel them without becoming a portion of
that beauty which we contemplate: it were superfluous to explain
how the gentleness and the elevation of mind connected with these
sacred emotions can render men more amiable, more generous and wise,
and lift them out of the dull vapours of the little world of self.
Dante understood the secret things of love even more than Petrarch.
His Vita Nuova is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of sentiment
and language: it is the idealized history of that period, and those
intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His apotheosis
of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love and her
loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have ascended
to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious imagination
of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed the
judgement of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
'Divine Drama', in the measure of the admiration which they accord
to the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual
hymn of everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato
alone of all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the
greatest writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated
the caverns of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance
of arms and superstition.
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