Read "Historia Amoris" by Edgar Saltus online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In the boyhood of Dante, Florence, the Flower City, was a place of much beauty, of perfect calm, of almost perfect equality, of pleasurable and polished life. There a brigade, the _Brigata Amorosa_, formed of a thousand people, had a lord who was a Lord of Love. During one of their recurrent festivals an entertainment was held at the home of Folco Portinari. To such entertainments Boccaccio said that children frequently accompanied their parents. To this particular entertainment, Dante, then a lad of nine, came with his father. He found there a number of boys and girls, among whom was Folco's daughter, Beatrice, a child with delicate features whose speech and attitude were perhaps superserious for her age.
Dante looked at her. "At that moment," he afterward, wrote, "I may truly say that the spirit of life which dwells in the most secret chambers of my heart, trembled in such wise that the least pulses of my being shook. So noble was her manner, that assuredly one might repeat of her the words of Homer: 'She seemed born not of mortal but of God."