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40 moving towards him in gracious sweetness, the only creature in Florence unaware of her own perfections, "crowned and clothed with humility;" or when the thoughts become too big to keep silent, betakes him to his chamber to write down the glowing words, and explain and dwell upon them, ringing the changes upon each intense minute detail. Thus he reached the very flower of his young manhood—not the less a man that he was so absorbed and adoring a lover. But his manhood, his fighting, his studying—all the other side of his life—is outside the 'Vita Nuova.' In this there is nothing but poetry, and the worship of that perfection of all womanhood, that embodiment of sweetness and purity and love.

One day he was sitting in his chamber, busy over, another sonnet, and, it would seem, thinking no evil, when the thunderbolt out of a clear sky, the calamity which he had divined in those agonising gleams of foresight, suddenly, without apparent warning, fell upon him. He had begun to consider, he says, all that he bad heretofore said of his lady, and found it defective and incomplete, especially those sonnets in which he had attempted to show the effect upon him of the sight of her, and the influence of her presence. "And not thinking that I should be able to say these things in the brief compass of a sonnet, I began a poem (canzone) thus:—

So long has Love held sway complete,

So used me to his sovereign reign,

That though at first 'twas mickle pain,

Now in my heart I find it sweet.

Though from my life the strength is gone,

And all my forceful spirits flee,

Yet comforts he my soul in me