Whoever has attentively studied the works of the Italian poets, from the days of Dante and Petrarch to those of Foscolo and Pindemonte, must have been struck with those allusions to the glory and the fall, the renown and the degradation, of Italy, which give a melancholy interest to their pages. Amidst all the vicissitudes of that devoted country, the warning voice of her bards has still been heard to prophesy the impending storm, and to call up such deep and spirit-stirring recollections from the glorious past, as have resounded through the land, notwithstanding the loudest tumults of those discords which have made her—
There is something very affecting in these vain, though exalted aspirations after that independence which the Italians, as a nation, seem destined never to regain. The strains in which their high-toned feelings on this subject are recorded, produce on our minds the same effect with the song of the imprisoned bird, whose melody is fraught, in our imagination, with recollections of the green woodland, the free air, and unbounded sky. We soon grow weary of the perpetual violets and zephyrs, whose cloying sweetness pervades the sonnets and canzoni of the minor Italian poets, till we are ready to “die in aromatic pain;” nor is our interest much more excited even by the everlasting laurel which inspires the enamoured Petrarch with so ingenious a variety of concetti, as might reasonably cause it to be doubted whether the beautiful Laura, or the emblematic tree, are the real object of the bard’s affection; but the moment a patriotic chord is struck, our feelings are awakened, and we find it easy to sympathise with the emotions of a modern Roman, surrounded by the ruins of the Capitol; a Venetian when contemplating the proud trophies won by his ancestors at Byzantium; or a Florentine amongst the tombs of the mighty dead, in the church of Santa Croce. It is not, perhaps, now the time to plead, with any effect, the cause of Italy; yet cannot we consider that nation as altogether degraded, whose literature, from the dawn of its majestic immortality, has been consecrated to the nurture of every generous principle and ennobling recollection; and whose “choice and master spirits,” under the most adverse circumstances, have kept alive a flame, which may well be considered as imperishable, since the “ten thousand tyrants” of the land have failed to quench its brightness. We present our readers with a few of the minor effusions, in which the indignant though unavailing regrets of those who, to use the words of Alfieri, are “slaves, yet still indignant slaves,”[149] have been feelingly portrayed.
The first of these productions must, in the original, be familiar to every reader who has any acquaintance with Italian literature.
[149] “Schiavi siam, ma schiavi ognor frementi.”—Alfieri.
THE SHORE OF AFRICA.
[“It was either during the present or a future visit to the same friends,[150] that the jeu-d’esprit was produced which Mrs Hemans used to call her ‘sheet of forgeries’ on the use of the word Barb. A gentleman had requested her to furnish him with some authorities from the old English writers, proving that this term was in use as applied to a steed. She very shortly supplied him with the following imitations, which were written down almost impromptu: the mystification succeeded perfectly, and was not discovered until some time afterwards.”—Memoir, p. 43.]
[150] The family of the late Henry Park, Esq., Wavertree Lodge, near Liverpool.
No sooner had the pearl-shedding fingers of the young Aurora tremulously unlocked the oriental portals of the golden horizon, than the graceful flower of chivalry and the bright cynosure of ladies’ eyes—he of the dazzling breastplate and swanlike plume—sprang impatiently from the couch of slumber, and eagerly mounted the noble barb presented to him by the Emperor of Aspramontania.
Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia.
Why, he can heel the lavolt, and wind a fiery barb, as well as any gallant in Christendom. He’s the very pink and mirror of accomplishment.
Shakspeare.
[Amongst the very few specimens that have been preserved of Mrs Hemans’s livelier effusions, which she never wrote with any other view than the momentary amusement of her own immediate circle, is a letter addressed about this time to her sister who was then travelling in Italy. The following extracts from this familiar epistle may serve to show her facility in a style of composition which she latterly entirely discontinued. The first part alludes to a strange fancy produced by an attack of fever, the description of which had given rise to many pleasantries—being an imaginary voyage to China, performed in a cocoa-nut shell with that eminent old English worthy, John Evelyn.]