and beauty, but an angelic presence, spotless from all earthly alloy, truest, purest, sweetest of created things, most pitiful, most courteous, yet with a heavenly severity of goodness in her, as incapable of approving what is evil as she is of anything but pity for the guilty—the embodiment of all purity and gentle wisdom, yet not a Virtue, always Beatrice, most loved and reverenced of women, yet a woman still. The curious, subtle, admirable art with which she is kept apart from us, yet ever real to us—surrounded with her body-guard of gentle ladies, never close enough to permit us even to glimpse the possibility of an imperfection, never placed in contact with anything that could stain, "the virgins, her companions," ever about her—is of itself one of the wonders of poetry. Beatrice is the centre of the mystic tale, yet we scarcely hear the sound of her footsteps and never of her voice; even the smile on her lovely face is an inference, though it lights all the subdued sweet atmosphere with a half-divine reflection. No one else, so far as we know, has ever thus accomplished the highest results of art with such a visionary exquisite vagueness, with an outline so veiled in mists of sacred awe and reverence. To every man and woman who has purely and truly loved, loved for love's sake, "all for love and nothing for reward," the 'Vita Nuova,' to the end of time, will be a revelation not only of Dante and the peerless Beatrice, but of themselves and their own hearts.
