Page:Sonnets and Ballate of Guido Cavalcanti.djvu/17

, or of that stranger state when the feeling by its intensity surpasses our powers of hearing, and we seem to stand aside and watch it surging across some thing or being with whom we are no longer identified.

The relation of certain words in the original to the practice of my translation may require gloze. L’ anima and la Morte are feminine, but it is not always expedient to retain this gender in English. Gentile is noble; gentleness in our current sense would be soavitate. Mente is mind, consciousness, apperception. The spiriti are the senses, or the intelligences of the senses, perhaps even “the moods,” when they are considered as “spirits of the mind.” Valore is power. Virtute, virtue, potency, requires a separate treatise. Pater has explained its meaning in the preface to his The Renaissance, but in reading a line like

one must have in mind the connotations alchemical, astrological, metaphysical, which Swedenborg would have called the correspondences.

The equations of alchemy were apt to be written as women’s names, and the women so named endowed with the magical powers of the compounds. Virtù is the potency, the efficient property of a substance or person. Thus modern science shows us radium with a noble virtue of energy. Each thing or person was held to send forth magnetisms