WOMEN AS INSPIRERS 657 



feet and as lights unto the paths of their male compeers in 

 the ordinary affairs of life, but have also been their guiding 

 stars and ministering angels in the highest spheres of in- 

 tellectual effort. 



For nearly fifteen centuries St. Jerome has had the grati- 

 tude of the church for his masterly translation, known as 

 the Vulgate, of the Hebrew Scriptures. But, had it not 

 been for his two noble friends, Paula and Eustochium, who 

 were as eminent for their intellectual attainments as they 

 were for their descent from the most distinguished families 

 of Rome and Greece, there would have been no Vulgate. 

 For they were not only his inspirers in this colossal under- 

 taking, but they were his active and zealous collaborators 

 as well. 



Dante and Petrarch are acclaimed as the morning stars 

 of modern literature, but both of them owed their immor- 

 tality to the inspiration of two pure-minded and noble- 

 hearted women. 



In the concluding paragraph of his Vita Nuova the 

 most beautiful love story ever written Dante records his 

 purpose to say of his inspirer, the gentle, gracious Beatrice 

 Portinari, "what was never said of any woman." The 

 outcome of this exalted purpose was the Divina Commedia, 

 the world's greatest literary masterpiece. 



Petrarch, the father of humanism, is the first to give 

 Laura de Noves credit for his attainments as a poet. In 

 one of his poems he sings : 



"Blest be the year, the month, the hour, the day, 

 The season and the time, and point of space, 

 And blest the beauteous country and the place 

 Where first of two eyes I felt the sway." 



Elsewhere in one of his prose dialogues with St. Augus- 

 tine he declares, "Whatever you see in me, be it little or 

 much, is due to her; nor would I ever have attained to 

 this measure of name and fame unless she had cherished 



