Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/135

Rh example. His Giostra, a poem on the tournament exhibited by Lorenzo's brother Giuliano in 1475, and incidentally introducing its hero's passion for the lovely Simonetta, remained unfinished in consequence of Giuliano's untimely death. It is full of beauties, and is memorable in Italian poetry as the first example of the thoroughly successful employment of the octave stanza. Boccaccio had been too diffuse; but Politian exemplified the perfect fitness of this form for the combination of narrative poetry with an inexhaustible succession of verbal felicities, many of which, indeed, are appropriated from earlier poets, but all, old and new, seem fused into a glowing whole by the passion for classic form and sensuous beauty. But Politian and his successors did not emulate the classical poets' accurate delineation of Nature. The materials of their descriptions are drawn from storehouses to which every scholar has a key. They bespeak reading and memory rather than actual observation.

This, in Miss Ellen Clerke's version, is Politian's rendering of the vision of perpetual Spring, first seen by Homer, after him by Lucretius, and in our time by Tennyson. Like Ariosto and Tasso, he places his enchanted garden on earth.

A fair hill doth the Cyprian breezes woo, And sevenfold stream of mighty Nilus see, When the horizon reddeneth anew; But mortal foot may not there planted be. A green knoll on its slope doth rise to view, A sunny meadow sheltering in its lee,  Where, wantoning 'mid flowers, each gale that passes  Sets lightly quivering the verdant grasses. A wall of gold its furthest edge doth screen, Where lies a vale with shady trees set fair,