despair not even the inspiration of genius is any safeguard, and Dante would seem to have been prostrated by the blow.
It was, however, the only legitimate and possible end for such a love. As the other love ends in marriage, so this developed, with that lofty kind of suitableness which is nature on such high levels, into the adoration, scarcely less distant, of a saint in heaven; and Madonna Beatrice, who never seems to have approached him nearer than in those passing encounters, whose presence so abashed him as to take away all power of speech, whose very approach was indicated to him by a tremor of all his being, became his, in a sweet, ineffable alliance, accepting and acknowledging in heaven the visionary tie which on earth had no existence. To such an ethereal adoration—so pure, so hopeless of any mortal recompense, so absorbing and so impossible—the only real climax was Heaven.
But in the meantime no immediate consolation came to the poet from this thought. "With all the mysticism of his medieval mind, and in a distraction of grief that shows through the strange, fantastic, scholastic argument, he thinks it "right that he should say something" of "the number nine," which has often been mentioned in the preceding story, and which, he concludes, has also "borne a part in the manner of her death." In what way "this number was allied" to Beatrice he now proceeds to tell:—
