Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/56

38 defer putting pen to paper for seventeen years, and, with consummate lyric power, is but unfrequently visited by the lyric impulse. Dante, so marvellously similar to Milton in many respects, also, if we may trust his account of the genesis of the pieces in the Vita Nuova, but seldom found himself under an irresistible impulse to lyrical composition. Something suggests to him that a sonnet or a canzone would be expedient or decorous; he plots it out, and fills up the outline with unerring fidelity to his first conception. The gigantic plan of the Divine Comedy is similarly carried out without interruption or misgiving; and but for the death of Beatrice, it is by no means certain that it would have existed, any more than that Milton would have written Comus if the noble children had never been lost in the wood.

A poet of this stamp was not likely to enrich literature with much fugitive verse. A few occasional poems glitter here and there, to employ Wordsworth's simile, like myrtle leaves in his chaplet of bay. The most remarkable among them is a sestine, the finest example of its artificial and elaborate class, and superbly translated by Rossetti; this and other pieces are supposed to refer to a certain Pietra, otherwise unknown. These poems seem to breathe the language of genuine passion, but are too few and of too uncertain date to contribute much to the solution of the question whether Dante was, as Boccaccio asserts, remarkable for susceptibility to female charms, or a paragon of continence, as Villani will have him. It is at least certain that, after Beatrice, no woman exercised any noteworthy influence upon his writings. He moves through life a great, lonely figure, estranged from human fellowship at every point; a citizen of eternity, misplaced and