She had already been in this life long enough for the heaven of the fixed stars to have moved toward the east a twelfth of a degree since she was born, so that she was at the beginning of her ninth year when she appeared to me, and I saw her when I was almost at the end of my ninth. Nine times, the heaven of the light had returned to where it was at my birth, almost to the very same point of its orbit, when the glorious lady of my mind first appeared before my eyes-she whom many called Beatrice without even knowing that was her name.
In the book of my memory-the part of it before which not much is legible-there is the heading Incipit vita nova. Under this heading I find the words which I intend to copy down in this little book if not all of them, at least their essential meaning.
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