Page:The New Life (Rossetti 1899) Siddal ed.djvu/86

have communicated its sense to too many by these present divisions, if it so happened that many should hear it.

 

When this song was a little gone abroad, a certain one of my friends, hearing the same, was pleased to question me, that I should tell him what thing love is; it may be, conceiving from the words thus heard a hope of me beyond my desert. Wherefore I, thinking that after such discourse it were well to say somewhat of the nature of Love, and also in accordance with my friend's desire, proposed to myself to write certain words in the which I should treat of this argument. And the sonnet that I then made is this:—

Love and the gentle heart are one same thing,
Even as the wise man^[1] in his ditty saith:
Each, of itself, would be such life in death
As rational soul bereft of reasoning.

1. Guido Guinicelli, in the canzone which begins, "Within the gentle heart Love shelters him."