of the soul's resources in time of trouble. From him the soul learns
that 'married to the truth she is a mistress but otherwise a slave shut
out of all liberty'" (The Banquet). But that knowledge is dependent upon
our intimacy with the life and spirit of Dante. In many other cases the
knowledge of the life and personality of an author may not be essential
to either our enjoyment or our understanding of his work. In the case of
Dante "he faces his own mirror and so appears in the mid-foreground of
his reflected word." Before looking into that mirror for Dante's
picture, let us first recall some of the established facts in his life
and then see what manner of man he appeared to those who were his
contemporaries or who lived chronologically near him.

Dante was born in Florence in the year 1265. His father was a notary
belonging to an old but decadent Guelph family, his mother, named Bella,
was a daughter of Durante Abati, a Ghibelline noble. Whether his own
family was regarded among the first families of nobility or not, it is
certain that Dante enjoyed the honor of knowing that one of his
forebears, Cacciaguida, had been knighted by Emperor Conrad II on the
Second Crusade. Precocious Dante must have been, as a boy, with
faculties and emotions extraordinarily developed, for in his ninth year,
while attending a festal party, he fell in love with a little girl named
Beatrice Portinari, eight years old. "Although still a child" to quote
Boccaccio his earliest biographer "he received her image into his heart
with such affection that from that day forward never so long as he
lived, did it depart therefrom." She became the wife of Simone dei
Bardi, and died in her twenty-fourth year, the subject of many sonnets
from her mystic lover who, if he had never written anything else, would
have been entitled, by his book of sonnets, his New Life, to rank as a
poet of the first class.