This is the
divine love "which where it shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all
other loves."[165] Wisdom is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to
contemplate God the true mirror (_verace spegio, speculum_), wherein all
things are seen as they truly are. Nay, she herself "is the brightness of
the eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."[166]
There are two beautiful passages in the _Convito_, which we shall quote,
both because they have, as we believe a close application to Dante's own
experience, and because they are good specimens of his style as a writer
of prose. In the manly simplicity which comes of an earnest purpose, and
in the eloquence of deep conviction, this is as far beyond that of any of
his contemporaries as his verse, nay, more, has hardly been matched by
any Italian from that day to this. Illustrating the position that "the
highest desire of everything and the first given us by nature is to
return to its first cause," he says: "And since God is the beginning of
our souls and the maker of them like unto himself, according as was
written, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness,' this soul most
greatly desires to return to him. And as a pilgrim who goes by a way he
has never travelled, who believes every house he sees afar off to be his
inn, and not finding it to be so directs his belief to another, and so
from house to house till he come to the inn, so our soul forthwith on
entering upon the new and never-travelled road of this life directs its
eyes to the goal of its highest good, and therefore believes whatever
thing it sees that seems to have in it any good to be that.
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