in the room was drawn to his condition. They woke him while he was in the act of saying, "Oh, Beatrice!" though his voice was so broken that they could not distinguish what he said; and the poet was consoled by finding it all a dream. After a while he tells what has happened to his sympathetic nurses, and finally weaves it into another song. Whether Beatrice had by this time shown symptoms of delicate health, or whether it was the mere foreboding of prescient love which made this dream so distinct and terrible, it is impossible to say.
The next scene is very different. Once more it is the dim, sweet world of the frescoes that opens upon us, and through the peopled space the poet sees, advancing towards him, a beautiful lady. Madonna Vanna, the beloved of Guido Cavalcanti, who had given her the name of Primavera, or Spring. After her, heralded by "the accustomed tremor" in his heart, came Beatrice, "each by the side of the other a miracle" of beauty and grace. As these two fair and sacred creatures passed him by, it suddenly occurred to Dante why the lesser wonder of the two should be called Primavera. Was she not, like spring, the harbinger of summer, as she went along, a little in advance of her heavenly companion? an office also expressed in her other name, Giovanna, which is derived from that John who preceded the True Light. This also, it is needless to say, was made into a sonnet, and specially sent to Guido Cavalcanti, whose heart was full of this beautiful precursor, as Dante's was of the still more perfect Beatrice. "This is Spring; and the name of the other is Love."
Thus dreaming dreams and seeing visions—now of Love himself, the youthful god, now of that fair representative
