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In the Vita Nuova, the remarkable blend of reminiscence and poetic excursion put together in the early 1290s, Dante tells of his first glimpse of Beatrice-she being at the start of her ninth year, as he calculates, and he near the end of his. "She appeared humbly and properly dressed," he remembers, "in a most noble color, crimson girded and adorned in the manner that befitted her so youthful age"-adorned, it may be supposed, with a wreath of flowers suitable for the occasion and for her youth. It was then that the boy's entire being yielded to the supreme power of Love, as the poet would describe the experience in his later idiom.
Following Love's command, Dante sought out Beatrice "many times in my childhood"; sought her out in the walkways of the sestiere and even more in the little church of Santa Margherita, the parish church of the Portinaris, where Beatrice came to pray with her mother and Monna Tessa almost every morning. Here Dante could sit not ten feet away and gaze at her in silent ardor. Gradually, he came to see in her "such noble and laudable bearing that of her could certainly be said those words of the poet Homer: `She seemed no child of mortal man but of God.'"
With the passing of days, Dante's rudimentary education went forward, in a local school perhaps, and sometimes with a private tutor. He evidently read Priscian, the sixth-century Latin grammarian (he puts Priscian in Hell alongside Brunetto Latini and the other sodomites, but this may be in part a case of mistaken identity), as well as a book of moral instruction that he learned by rote, the fables of Aesop, and a treatise on polite behavior. The medieval Latin he was introduced to proved a hindrance rather than a help to the reading of Virgil, Cicero, and Boethius a decade afterward, under the guidance of Latini. But Dante absorbed everything-philosophy, theology, literature, history-and forgot nothing; and his visual imagination was being stirred constantly by wanderings in the interiors of the great churches of Florence and the bridges and the distending vistas of river and hills that they afforded.
There seems to have been no question at any time of a formal engagement...