Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, Issue 15, January, 1859, page 129 by Various

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130

the golden harvest.

[Footnote 1: Vita di Dante. Milan, 1823, pp. 29, 30.]

[Footnote 2: _Vita di Dante_, p. 69.]

[Footnote 3: For vita nova in the sense of _early life_, see _Purgatory_, xxx. 115, with the comments of Landino and Benvenuto da Imola; and for _età novella_ in a similar sense, see Canzone xviii. st. 6. Fraticelli, who supports this interpretation, gives these with other examples, but none more to the point. Mr. Joseph Carrow, who had a translation into English of the _Vita Nuova_, printed at Florence in 1840, entitles his book "The Early Life of Dante Allighieri." But as giving probability to the meaning to which we incline, see Canzone x. st. 5.

"Lo giorno che costei nel mondo venne, Secondo che si trova Nel libro della mente che vien meno, La mia persona parvola sostenne Una passion nova."

That day when she unto the world attained, As is found written true Within the book of my now sinking soul, Then by my childish nature was sustained A passion new.

In referring to Dante's Minor Poems, we shall refer to them as they stand in the first volume of Fraticelli's edition of the _Opere Minore al Dante_, Firenze, 1834. There is great need of a careful, critical edition of the Canzoniere of Dante, in which poems falsely ascribed to him should no longer hold place among the genuine. But their is little hope for this from Italy; for the race of Italian commentators on Dante is, as a whole, more frivolous, more impertinent, and duller, than that of English commentators on Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 4: The word in the original (Villani, Book vii. C. 89) is _Giocolari_, the Italian form of the French _jongleur_,--the appellation of those whose profession was to sing or recite the verses of the troubadours or the romances of chivalry.]

[Footnote 5: See Boccaccio, _Decamerone_, Giorn. vi, Nov. 9, for an entertaining picture of Florentine festivities.]

[Footnote 6: The feeling which moved Florence thus to build herself i

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