"
When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Constance, filled her room up
with something fairer than the reality had ever been. There is no
idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if it be a regret of fancy
as much as of real feeling. She early began to undergo that change into
something rich and strange in the sea[136] of his mind which so
completely supernaturalized her at last. It is not impossible, we think,
to follow the process of transformation. During the period of the
_Convito Canzoni_, when he had so given himself to study that to his
weakened eyes "the stars were shadowed with a white blur,"[137] this star
of his imagination was eclipsed for a time with the rest. As his love had
never been of the senses (which is bestial),[138] so his sorrow was all
the more ready to be irradiated with celestial light, and to assume her
to be the transmitter of it who had first awakened in him the nobler
impulses of his nature,--
("Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentially,")
and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of the highest good. With
that turn for double meaning and abstraction which was so strong in him,
her very name helped him to allegorize her into one who makes blessed
(_beat_), and thence the step was a short one to personify in her that
Theosophy which enables man to see God and to be mystically united with
him even in the flesh.
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