Madonna Beatrice stood arrested there among her maidens, pale and fair, as an angel might stand, ranged about by radiant mortality. I never could find then, and I never shall find, though I have tried often enough, Lord knows, the exact word or exact sequence of words that should fittingly convey the effect of her beauty, even upon those who having seen it often seemed on each occasion to behold it for the first time. Of her, as of every beauty that has graced the world since Helen set fire to Troy, and Semiramis sent dead lovers adrift down the river of Assyria, and Cleopatra charmed Cæsar and Antony and Heaven knows who besides, it might be said that she had the familiar features of womankind; but what it was that made those features so marvellous, ah! there was the task for a greater poet than I to take upon his shoulders. Even the great poet that loved her—and I keep his love-book on my shelf to this hour, wedged in between a regiment of the Fathers—even Dante has told us nothing that shall serve to make the ages yet to come understand what the woman was like that a man could love with so rapturous a madness of passion. Sometimes I have thought, in my gropings after the phrase to express her, that the word "luminous" was, perhaps, of all single words, the word that seemed to hold shut in its casket the most of the meaning that I sought to convey. There seemed to be about her, even to me that was never her lover, a radiancy, a nimbus, as it were, of celestial light that gave to pulsing flesh and running blood and circumambient skin a quality that was, as it were, flamelike, ethereal, unreal.
Yet though the essence of her bodily being was, as I knew, so frail, there was no show of frailness in her gracious presence. She was tall for a woman, and her coloring was fresh and sane; her bust and limbs were moulded with a wise and restrained generosity that became her youth, and promised nobility of proportion for her maturity. She moved with the smooth and lively carriage of a nymph down the woodland lawns, with her head easily erect and her eyes steadily seeing the world. She might almost have been the youngest of the Amazons or the latest of those strange demi-deities that haunted the hills and woods and waters until the death of the god Pan dealt them, too, their death-blow. Her eyes had the clearness of a clear night in June; her lips were quick with the brisk crimson of a pink quince. Oh, Saint Cupido, what vanity is this, to essay to paint the unpaintable! Enough that she was young and fair and shapely, and that if in her eyes there dwelt the pensiveness of those whose very loveliness suggests a destined melancholy, her lips were always smiling, and her greeting always blithe, yet I seemed to see black care incarnate behind her, and I will tell you why.
Among the girls that were gathered about her, plump, comely, jolly girls that were, I will readily confess it, more in my way of wooing than their radiant mistress, there stood the figure of a thin and withered man in black, with very white hair and very smooth, gray cheeks and very bright, wise eyes. Him I knew to be Messer Tommaso Severo, that had served the Portinari as leech for longer years than many in Florence could count. He it was that had ushered Messer Folco himself into this troublesome world, that is, however, less troublesome at Florence than elsewhere. He had done the like for Madonna Beatrice, and from the hour of her birth he, whom many blamed for a pagan cynicism and philosophic disdain of humanity, had watched over her life with the tenderness that watches the growth of some fair and unfamiliar flower. He was, besides being a master-physician, one that was thoroughly learned in the science of the stars, and I have always heard that the horoscope he drew for my lady Beatrice was the chief cause of his tireless devotion and care. To her service he had dedicated the lees of his life and the ripeness of his knowledge. It was he who had carried her away for so long a space of years from the summer heats and winter colds of Florence to the green temperance and tranquillity of the hills. It was he who at last, still guided by that horoscope of which he alone knew the lesson, sanctioned the maiden's return to the city, to live outside which, though even in the loveliest places thereafter attainable, is to live in exile. I know for sure that he said of his sweet charge that flesh and spirit were so exquisitely poised in her perfect body that it needed but some breath of fate to scatter them irrevocably apart, as a child's breath can scatter the down of a dandelion to all the corners of a field. But though I thought of this now, as I beheld the girl and the elder so close together, I could not, for my life, believe it, seeing how buoyantly she carried her beauty and the nobility of her color.
Messer Dante still had the two ends of the roll of parchment in his fingers as Madonna Beatrice entered the hall, and in the very instant of her appearance he was aware of her presence, and I that was watching all things at once, like Argus in the antique fable, I saw how his hands trembled and how his lips quivered with the knowledge of her approach. But otherwise he showed no sign of the advance of divinity, and holding the parchment well before his face, rolling and unrolling as the duty needed, he began to read what was written on the skin.
The poem, as I already knew, made up the second part of a lengthy ballad in praise of the ladies of Florence. It was cast in an allegorical fashion, aiming to portray a pageant of fair women, each single verse seeking to picture some one of the many lovely ladies that in those days made Florence a very Venus Hill for the ravishment of the senses and the stirring of the blood. I wish with all my heart that I could set the whole of it down here, for it was most ingeniously fancied and handled, and it was not over difficult for the admirers of any particular beauty to pierce the dainty veil of symbolism with which the poet had pretended to envelop her identity. Alas! my memory will not serve me to recall the greater part of it, or, indeed, any but a little, though that little is in truth the very kernel of the whole, and I have no copy of the ballad by me to mend my memory. But, as I say, what I do remember is the centre-jewel of its crown of song.
My Dante read the verses that were his own verses in a voice that was very even, melodious, but so sustained and tamed as to make it seem plain to all that listened that he was dealing with somewhat whose matter he had never seen before. And as he read each stanza, with its laudation of some lovely lady that was one of the living graces and glories of our city, those that spelled the cryptic riddle of its meaning clapped their hands for pleasure and turned their eyes to where the lady thus bepraised stood and smiled at her, and she, delighted, would bridle and fidget with her fan and seek to maintain herself as if she did not care one whit for what in reality she prized very highly. So the river of sweet words ran on, sweetly voiced, and flowing in its appointed course with a golden felicity of thought and phrase.
Very soon the roll of parchment in Dante's right hand was larger by much than the roll of parchment in Dante's left, and it was plain indeed to all present that the reading and the poem were coming to an end. It was also plain to all present that the utterance of the poet was growing more agitated, and his manner more embarrassed and anxious, and it was manifest to me, who watched him keenly, that he was trembling like a cypress in a light wind. As he came to the last verse it seemed as if some irresistible compulsion compelled him to turn his head in the direction where Madonna Beatrice stood apart with her women and her leech. As he did so the parchment fell from his suddenly parted fingers and lay in two rolls at his feet. But, as if he were unaware of what had happened, Dante went on with his recitation of the poem. I could see very clearly that the madness of love was wholly upon him, the madness that makes a man lose all heed of what he does and be conscious of naught save the presence of the beloved. He stood there rigid, as one possessed, with his face turned in the direction where the lady Beatrice stood amid her women, and his hands, newly liberated from the control of the parchment that lay at his feet, were clasped together in a tight embrace. And when I turned my gaze from him to her whose beauty he so passionately regarded, I was aware that she too was under the spell of his words, and was conscious of the adoration in his eyes. Truly that boy and that girl, as they stood there in the clean springtide of their youth and comeliness, seemed to me to be a pair very properly and lovingly made by Heaven one for the other. "Here," said I to myself, "if there be any truth in Messer Plato's theory of affinities, here is a living proof of the Grecian whimsy. And here," I said to myself, "if folk must needs marry—a thing I never could understand—here, as I think, is an instance in which a man and a woman might really be happy together, making true mates, lovers, and friends, finding life sweet to share, and finding nothing in their union that was not noble and pure." So I thought while my Dante was betraying his secret by repeating his lesson without his book.
These were the words that he spoke with his eyes fixed upon the lady Beatrice, and they live in my memory as fresh as they seemed on the day when I first read them in Messer Guido's lodging, and the evening when I first heard them in Messer Folco's hall. Here is what they said:
"Blessed they name the lady whom I love,
Even as the angelic lips in Paradise
At last shall bless her when she moves above
The sun and all the stars. But while mine eyes
Regard her ere she numbers the Nine Skies,
Immortal in her mortal loveliness,
Can I be scorned if to my soul of sighs
Earth's blessing seems the greater, Heaven's the less?"