"
Beatrice now turns to Dante and rebukes him: "In order the more to shame
thee from thine error and to make thee stronger, never did nature and
art present to thee a charm equal to that fair form now scattered in
earth with which I was enclosed. And if this greatest of charms so
forsook thee at my death, what mortal thing should thereafter have led
thee to desire it? Verily at the first hour of disappointment over
elusive things, thou shouldst have flown up after me who was no longer
of them. Thou shouldst not have allowed thy wings to be weighed down to
get more wounds, either by a little maid or by any other so short lived
vanity." The effect of her rebuke is the overwhelming of his heart with
shame and contrition. "So much remorse gnawed at my heart that I fell
vanquished and what I then became she knoweth who gave me the cause"
(Purg. XXXI, 49). He arose forgiven, the memory of his sin removed by
the waters of Lethe. Then drinking of the waters of Eunoe he was made
fit to ascend to Heaven.
To understand the allusion to his defection and to see the progressive
development of his love of Beatrice as a woman, then as a living ideal
and finally as an animated symbol--the various transfigurations in which
Beatrice appears to him, we must go back to his New Life--the book of
which Charles Eliot Norton says--"so long as there are lovers in the
world and so long as lovers are poets this first and tenderest
love-story of modern literature will be read with appreciation and
responsive sympathy.
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