Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/214

196 And earth disdain, and higher mount and higher: Nor of the fate of Icarus inquire, Nor cautious droop, or sway to either hand; Dead I shall fall, full well I understand; But who lives gloriously as I expire? Yet hear I my own heart that pleading cries, ''Stay, madman, whither art thou bound? descend!'' Ruin is ready Rashness to chastise. But I, Fear not, though this indeed the end; Cleave we the clouds, and praise our destinies, If noble fall on noble flight attend."

Suspicion, jealousy, bitterly wounded feeling, open breach, and hollow reconciliation make up the remainder of the sonnets, the best of which have few superiors in any literature for fire and passion. His other poetical performances are far from inconsiderable. The best known is the sin of his youth, the Vendemmiatore, whose ultra-Fescennine truth to rustic manners and the licence of the vintage brought it into the Index, and its author into gaol. In quite a different key are his delightful didactic poems, Il Podere, on the management of an estate, and La Balía, on the care of children, translated by Roscoe. Some of his familiar Capitoli are very pleasing, and some of his miscellaneous poems are very fine, especially this on the Spaniards slain by the Turks at Castel Nuovo, on the coast of Dalmatia:

Hail, scene of fated Valour's final stand, Revered for these sad heaps of whitening bone, Their trace who other monument have none Pyreless and tombless on this desert strand; Who hitherward from far Iberian land  To Adria's shores on blast of battle blown, With streaming blood of foemen, and their own, Came to empurple foreign sea and sand.