Vague forces, which the lover himself realises as mysterious, run high in the Vita Nuova and in the poems; the lover has hallucinations in sleep and sickness. In the third canzone Dante speaks of the impossibility of comprehending what gave him a glimpse of the nature of his mistress. It was a foreboding of new and great things, struggling slowly and gradually to take shape, for the creation of a world-system, one of whose supporting pillars was personal love of an individual, was an unprecedented achievement. "When she speaks a spirit inclines from heaven." The angels implore God to call this "miracle" into their midst, but God wills that they shall have patience until the "Hope of the Blessed" appears.
Love says of her can there be mortal thing
At once adorned so richly and so pure?
Then looks on her and silently affirms
That heaven designed in her a creature new.
(Transl. by C. Lyell.)
Again and again recurs the motif of her beauty before which the world must fall prostrate. In a sonnet not included in the Vita Nuova he says:
In heaven itself that lady had her birth,
I think, and is with us for our behoof;
Blessed are they who meet her on the earth.