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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.
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