lover the truth which is the native desire of the soul,
and in the attainment of which is beatitude.

It is this conception which forms the bond of union
between the New Life, the Banquet, and the Divine
Comedy, and not merely as literary compositions but
as autobiographical records. Dante's life and his
work are not to be regarded apart; they form a single
whole, and they possess a dramatic development of
unparalleled consistency and unity. The course of
the events of his life shaped itself in accordance with
an ideal of the imagination, and to this ideal his works
correspond. His first writing, in his poems of love
and in the story of the New Life, forms as it were the
first act of a drama which proceeds from act to act in
its presentation of his life, with just proportion and
due sequence, to its climax and final scene in the last
words of the Divine Comedy. It is as if Fate had
foreordained the dramatic unity of his life and work,
and impressing her decree upon his imagination, had
made him her more or less conscious instrument in its
fulfillment.

Had Dante written only his prose treatises and his
minor poems, he would still have come down to us as
the most commanding literary figure of the Middle
Ages, the first modern with a true literary sense, the
writer of love verses whose imagination was at once
more delicate and more profound than that of any
among the long train of his successors, save Shake-
speare alone, and more free from sensual stain than
that of Shakespeare; the poet of sweetest strain and
fullest control of the resources of his art, the scholar
of largest acquisition and of completest mastery over
his acquisitions, and the moralist with higher ideals of

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