• Guido Guinicelli, the best of the Italian poets before Dante, flourished in the first half of the thirteenth century. He was a native of Bologna, but of his life nothing is known. His most celebrated poem is a Canzone on the Nature of Love, which goes far to justify the warmth and tenderness of Dante’s praise. Rossetti, Early Italian Poets , p. 24, gives the following version of it, under the title of “The Gentle Heart”:⁠— “Within the gentle heart Love shelters him, As birds within the green shade of the grove. Before the gentle heart, in Nature’s scheme, Love was not, nor the gentle heart ere Love. For with the sun, at once, So sprang the light immediately; nor was Its birth before the sun’s. And Love hath his effect in gentleness Of very self; even as Within the middle fire the heat’s excess. “The fire of Love comes to the gentle heart Like as its virtue to a precious stone; To which no star its influence can impart Till it is made a pure thing by the sun: For when the sun hath smit From out its essence that which there was vile, The star endoweth it. And so the heart created by God’s breath Pure, true, and clean from guile, A woman, like a star, enamoreth.