Ah sweet, how sweet, the love within thy heart, When on thy breast the nursing infant lay: What gentle actions, sweetly loving play, Thine, with thy holy child apart. When for a little while he sometimes slept, Thou eager to awake thy paradise, Soft, soft, so that he could not hear thee, crept, And laidest thy lips close to his eyes, Then, with the smile maternal calling, "Nay, 'Twere naughty to sleep longer, wake, I say!"
The almost incoherent repetition of the word "Love," in one of his poems, is suggestive of the man; despair for human love led to his half-crazed absorption in the divine. Very sweetly sounds this sacred meditation's echo of his recollection of the nights of his own childhood, of which he has told, when his mother, as she waked, would make a light and come and lean over his bed, till sometimes his eyes would open to see her watching him there. His father did not spare the rod for the careless boy, nor in later years did the father of his soul; but the divine motherhood of memory and of present faith bent with yearning eyes, we may be sure, over his anxious sleep in prison or in the ascetic cell.
But it was only the greatest of all these poets who could leave us the lovely image of the new-born soul that comes forth in its simplicity from the hand that loves it before its birth, playing like a young girl who weeps and smiles. Yet Dante's principal sensation about childhood is its helplessness, and the mother's eyes, which throw its aureole about infancy, do not seem to have held their tenderest meaning for him. He would never have gone beyond the original ten lines of
But he gives beauty to the child's frightened eyes when they meet its mother's, and certainly the vision, whether real or imagined, toward the close of the _Vita Nuova_ will please forever. This straying love is recalled to its old faithfulness by "the strong imagination" of a little figure that is habited in red, just as it had appeared to him when, perhaps in Folco's Florentine garden, the boy not quite nine fell in love with the girl of eight.
Perhaps Boccaccio's story of the falcon is too familiar to quote, though it illustrates domestic love too well to be unmentioned. One hardly can choose the best of its touches--the bright account of the boy running over the fields with his mother's old-time lover, as he hawked, always eying with a boy's eagerness for ownership the famous falcon, the only remnant of Frederick's gay and wealthy life, which he had lost for the unsuccessful love; or the picture of the mother again and again begging the child, as he lay ill, to tell her something which he desired, so that she might obtain it for him; until his feverish imagination persuaded him that to have the wonderful falcon would make him well again; or our thought of the impoverished gentleman, whose devotion had lasted under the years of exile on his little farm, his hope departed, who when suddenly visited by his widowed love, and finding nothing in the larder, nor money, nor even anything valuable enough for a pledge to secure some entertainment for her, desperately wrung the neck of his precious bird; or the delicate hesitation and awkwardness of the lady when she came to explain her errand, and the struggle, before love for her child bent both pride and pity; or the lover's broken heart when he found that his excess of devotion had cost him his only opportunity of pleasing her. The whole may be read in a little play of Tennyson's later years, or among the _Tales of a Wayside Inn_; but it is much better to read it in the narrative of the Certaldesian. Tuscany has sent us down no tenderer story.