His _Vita Nuova_ is an inexhaustible fountain of purity of
sentiment and language: it is the idealized history of that period,
and those intervals of his life which were dedicated to love. His
apotheosis of Beatrice in Paradise, and the gradations of his own love
and her loveliness, by which as by steps he feigns himself to have
ascended to the throne of the Supreme Cause, is the most glorious
imagination of modern poetry. The acutest critics have justly reversed
the judgment of the vulgar, and the order of the great acts of the
_Divine Drama_, in the measure of the admiration which they accord to
the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. The latter is a perpetual hymn of
everlasting love. Love, which found a worthy poet in Plato alone of
all the ancients, has been celebrated by a chorus of the greatest
writers of the renovated world; and the music has penetrated the caverns
of society, and its echoes still drown the dissonance of arms and
superstition. At successive intervals, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare,
Spenser, Calderon, Rousseau, and the great writers of our own age,
have celebrated the dominion of love, planting, as it were, trophies
in the human mind of that sublimest victory over sensuality and force.
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