Love as a passion and a principle of action never left him to his dying
day, from the time when he, a boy of nine years of age, became attracted
by the sweet little girl Beatrice. "She appeared to me" he says,
"clothed in a most noble color, a modest and becoming crimson, and she
was girt and adorned in such wise as befitted her very youthful age." If
we add to those few lines the brief statements made later in the _New
Life_ that her hair was light and her complexion a pearl-pink and that
when he saw her as a maiden she was dressed in white, we have the only
description that Dante ever gave of her personal appearance. It was
love at sight. "I truly say that at that instant the spirit of life
which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, said these words:
'Behold a god stronger than I, who coming shall rule over me.' From that
time forward Love lorded it over my soul which had been so speedily
wedded to him and he began to exercise over me such control and such
lordship, through the power which my imagination gave him, that it
behooved me to do completely all his pleasure."
If we are disposed to doubt Dante's capability of deep emotion at so
tender an age we have only to remember that Cupid's darts pierced at an
early age the hearts of others of precocious sensibilities.
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