that is to say, of good works. She, having "washed him thoroughly from sin,"[129]
"All dripping brought
Into the dance of the four beautiful,"[130]
who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars, guides of the Practical Life, which he had seen when he came out of the Hell where he had beheld the results of sin, and arrived at the foot of the Mount of Purification. That these were the special virtues of practical goodness Dante had already told us in a passage before quoted from the Convito.[131] That this was Dante's meaning is confirmed by what Beatrice says to him,[132]
"Short while shalt thou be here a forester (silvano)
And thou shalt be with me forevermore
A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman";
for by a "forest" he always means the world of life and action.[133] At the time when Dante was writing the Canzoni on which the Convito was a comment, he believed science to be the "ultimate perfection itself, and not the way to it,"[134] but before the Convito was composed he had become aware of a higher and purer light, an inward light, in that Beatrice, already clarified wellnigh to a mere image of the mind, "who lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth with my soul."[135]
So spiritually does Dante always present Beatrice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the Vita Nuova, that many, like Biscione and Rossetti, have doubted her real existence. But surely we must consent to believe that she who speaks of
"The fair limbs wherein
I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth,"
was once a creature of flesh and blood,—
"A creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food."
When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance, filled her room up with something fairer than the reality had ever been. There is no idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo that change into something rich and strange in the sea[136] of his mind which so completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not impossible, we think, to follow the process of transformation. During the period of the Convito Canzoni, when he had so given himself to study that to his weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur,"[137] this star of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had never been of the senses (which is bestial),[138] so his sorrow was all the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler impulses of his nature,—