“Beyond the sphere that widest orbit hath
    Passeth the sigh that issues from my
    heart,
    While weeping Love doth unto him impart
    Intelligence which leads him on his path,

  “When at the wished-for place his flight he
      stays,
    A lady he beholds, in honor dight,
    And shining so, that, through her splendid
      light,
    The pilgrim spirit upon her doth gaze.

  “He sees her such that his reporting words
    I understand not, for he speaketh low
    And strange to the sad heart which makes
      him tell;

  “He speaketh of that gentle one, I know,
    Since oft he Beatrice’s name records;
    So, ladies dear, I understand him well.”

This was the last of the poems which Dante composed in immediate honor and memory of Beatrice, and is the last of those which he inserted in the “Vita Nuova.”  It was not that his love grew cold, or that her image became faint in his remembrance; but, as he tells us in a few concluding and memorable words, from this time forward he devoted himself to preparation for a work in which the earthly Beatrice should have less part, while the heavenly and blessed spirit of her whom he had loved should receive more becoming honors.  The lover’s grief was to find no more expression; the lamentations for the loss which could never be made good to him were to cease; the exhibition of a personal sorrow was at an end.  Love and grief, in their double ministry, had refined, enlarged, and exalted his spirit to the conception of a design unparalleled in its nature, and of which no intellectual genius, unpurged by suffering, and impenetrated in its deepest recesses by the spiritualizing heats of emotion, would have been capable of conceiving.  Moreover, as time wore on, its natural result was gradually to withdraw the poet from the influence of temporary excitements of feeling, resulting from his experience of love and death, and to bring him to the contemplation of life as affected by the presence and the memory of Beatrice in its eternal and universal relations.  He tells us in the “Convito,” that, “after some time, my mind, which neither such consolation as I could give it, nor that offered to it by others, availed to comfort, determined to turn to that method by which others in grief had consoled themselves.  And I set myself to read that book, but little known, of Boethius, in which in prison and exile he had consoled himself.  And hearing, likewise, that Tully had written a book, in which, treating of friendship, he had offered some words of comfort to Laelius, a most excellent man, on the death of Scipio, his friend, I read this also.  And although at first it was hard for me to enter into their meaning, I at length entered into it so far as my knowledge of language, and such little capacity as I had, enabled me; by means of which capacity, I had already, like one dreaming, seen many things, as may be seen in the ’New Life.’  And as it might happen that a man seeking silver should, beyond his expectation, find gold, which a hidden chance presents to him, not, perhaps, without Divine direction, so I, who sought for consolation, found not only a remedy for my tears, but also acquaintance with authors, with knowledge, and with books.”