with so many thoughts of Beatrice, but that he hoped to hear more. By-and-by another group came past with the same murmurs of reverential sympathy. "Which of us can be glad any more who have heard her talk so piteously?" they said. This evidently produced in the poet a new outburst of grief, for they then transferred their regards to him, saying among themselves, "He that sits there could not weep more had he seen her as we have done;" and, "he is so altered that he does not seem himself." And still, as the ladies went and came, "I could hear them speak thus" (with a certain satisfaction and pleasure in the conjunction) "of her and of me." "Wherefore afterwards," he adds, with that curious recollection and presence of mind in the midst of his self-abandonment, which is at once so artless and so quaintly artificial, "having considered, and perceiving that there was herein matter for poetry, I resolved that I would write certain rhymes in which should be contained all that these ladies had said." Two sonnets follow which we need not quote.
Shortly after, Dante himself fell ill—so ill as to be reduced to great weakness after serious suffering, and on the ninth day of his sickness (for everything is regulated by this mystic number), being very ill, thoughts of death came into his mind. But these thoughts were not of his own death, which would have been sufficiently natural. What was he, that any one should think of his living or dying? The thought that rushed upon him with all the force of a revelation was that some time or other "the very gentle Beatrice must die." Notwithstanding the visionary gleam of this possibility which appears in the canzone above quoted, where the angels
