The Vita Nuova, Tr., with an Intr. and Notes by T. Martin (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION. Nuova' ] HERE is not in literature a more remarkable contribution to the personal history of a great man than the ' Vita of Dante. It is a chronicle equally minute in analysis, and admirable in expression, of emotions the most profound; a record of real life to which there is nothing superior in romance. It traces the master passion of the poet's life from its dawn through its first purifying phases of reverence and affliction; and not only is his heart laid bare before us, but we are made, as it were, to see the very processes by which his poetical genius wrought. Every incident, every emotion, out of which his verses grew, is there, side by side with the verses themselves, ? and thus we are enabled to trace the workings of hisshaping spirit of imagination, lifting the real into the ideal, or rather pouring its own golden light around a beautiful reality. Beatrice, with her sweet smile, her voice rich with the music of a noble heart, her infinite grace which made her supreme among the graceful, comes before us as vividly as Imogen or Desdemona; and with a deeper interest, for we know that she was no mere being shaped out of the poet's brain, but a perfect woman, whose influence refined and ennobled the poet's heart, filling it with those yearnings after that ideal of beauty and goodness, which it is the peculiar office of woman to inspire: and kindling and sustaining within him that ambition to consecrate his genius to her honour, which has linked their names in a splendid immortality. His dream, his guiding star, while she lived, Beatrice became his angel, his monitress, his aspiration, when dead. Her image cheered and sustained him through exile, and poverty, and desolation. Through her he was incited to rise above the common herd. She it was who opened tha...