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error; the light, because it illuminates us in the darkness of our earthly ignorance. This doctrine, I say, makes us sure above all other reasonings; since He has given it who sees and measures our immortality, which we cannot perfectly see while our mortal is mixed with the immortal; but we see it perfectly by faith; and by reason we see it darkly in consequence of the mixture of our mortality. And this should be the most potent argument of all, that in us these two exist; and I thus believe, and affirm, and am certain that I shall pass after this life to a better—where lives that glorious lady whom my soul loved."

A book in which such passages as this occur—even though its reasoning may be antiquated in form and imperfect in argument—cannot fail to reward the studious reader; but it is not likely to lay a strong hold upon the general mind—and that the poet himself felt this, seems apparent from the fact that instead of the fourteen poems promised by Dante at the beginning, the work breaks off when only three of these poems, each with the same elaborate commentary, have been set before us. The second, the reader may remember, was sung by Casella to Dante, in the fresh morning landscape and soft sunshine, when the two met on the shore at the foot of the Purgatorial hill; a song so sweet that it beguiled even the delivered souls, and made them forget their own high errand, and that they were on the road to heaven. "Love which in my mind discourses of my lady" is still the subject; but the often-lauded perfections of that blessed Beatrice, of which the poet has already told us he will speak no more, are here presented to us with a difference, the allegorical thrusting itself in advance of the real, as never in the most dazzling mists of the 'Vita Nuova' it had done before—so that we are never sure how much is Beatrice, and how much