We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have been as purely imaginary as the Dulcinea of Don Quixote, useful only as _motives_, but a real Beatrice is as essential to the human sympathies of the _Divina Commedia_ as her glorified Idea to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante understood perfectly well.[161] Take _her_ out of the poem, and the heart of it goes with her; take out her ideal, and it is emptied of its soul. She is the menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve and mingle into unity. Those who doubt her existence must find Dante's graceful sonnet[162] to Guido Cavalcante as provoking as Sancho's story of his having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat was to his master, "so alien is it from all that which eminent persons, who are constituted and preserved for other exercises and entertainments, do and ought to do."[163] But we should always remember in reading Dante that with him the allegorical interpretation is the true one (_verace sposizione_), and that he represents himself (and that at a time when he was known to the world only by his minor poems) as having made righteousness (_rettitudine_, in other words, moral philosophy) the subject of his verse.[164] Love with him seems first to have meant the love of truth and the search after it (_speculazione_), and afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite source (_speculazione_ in its higher and mystical sense). This is the divine love "which where it shines darkens and wellnigh extinguishes all other loves."[165] Wisdom is the object of it, and the end of wisdom to contemplate God the true mirror (_verace spegio, speculum_), wherein all things are seen as they truly are. Nay, she herself "is the brightness of the eternal light, the unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."[166]