“No,” she replied; “for I have lived to the end, and return to life. [I am a fairy (fata) who came to earth to teach thee that fortune and power are given to the great not to oppress the weak and poor, but to benefit.”]
Saying this she died, and there remained a great bouquet of flowers.
The Emperor took his daughter to the palace, where she passed for his niece, and with her the flowers in which he ever beheld his old fairy love, and thus he lived happy and contented.
To supply a very important omission in this legend, I would add that the bouquet was certainly of lilies, as occurs in other legends, and the real meaning of the whole is a very significant illustration of the history and meaning of the flower. Old writers and mythic symbolism, as Friedrich and many more have shown, believed that Nature taught, not vaguely and metaphorically, but directly, many moral lessons, and that of the lily was purity and truth. By comparing this with the other stories relating to this flower which I have given, it will hardly be denied that my conjectural emendations formed part of the original, which the narrator had not remembered or understood.
There is something beautifully poetical in the fancy that spirits, fata, assume human form, that they by their influence on great men, princes or kaisars, may change their lives, and teach them lessons by means of love or flowers. This makes of the tale an allegory. It was in this light that Dante saw all the poems of Virgil, as appears by passages in the “Convito,” in which curious book (p. 36, ed. 1490) there is a passage declaring that the world is round and hath a North and South Pole, in the former of which there is a city named Maria, and on the other one called Lucia, and that Rome is 2,600 miles from the one, “more or less,” and 7,500 miles from the other.
“And thus do men, each in his different way,
From fancies unto wilder fancies stray.”
Or as the same great poet expresses it in the same curious book: “Man is like unto a weary pilgrim upon a road which he hath never before travelled, who every time that he sees from afar a house, deems that it is the lodging which he seeks, and finding his mistake, believes it is the next, and so he erreth on from place to place until he finds the tavern which he seeks. And ’tis the same, be it with boys seeking apples or birds, or their elders taking fancies to garments, or a horse, or a woman, or wealth, ever wanting something else or more and so ever on.”
The lily in Italian tales is the flower of happy, saintly deaths; it fills the beds of the departing, it sprouts from the graves of the holy and the good. In one legend it is the white flower of the departing soul which changes into a white bird. But in this story it has a doubly significant meaning, as the crest of Florence and as conveying a significant meaning to its ruler.
The “Convito” of Dante is not nearly so well known as the “Commedia,” but it deserves study. The only copy which I have ever read is the editio princeps of 1490, which I bought of an itinerant street-vendor for 4 soldi, or twopence.