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[73] Whether at the time when the poems of the Vita Nuova were written the Lady who withdrew him for a while from Beatrice was (which we doubt) a person of flesh and blood or not, she was no longer so when the prose narrative was composed. Any one familiar with Dante's double meanings will hardly question that by putting her at a window, which is a place to look out of, he intended to imply that she personified Speculation, a word which he uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes as looking for, sometimes as seeing (like Shakespeare's

There is no speculation in those eyes),

sometimes as intuition, or the beholding all things in God, who is the cause of all. This is so obvious, and the image in this sense so familiar, that we are surprised it should have been hitherto unremarked. It is plain that, even when the Vita Nuova was written, the

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Vita Nuova (2)
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