Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/217

Rh Not with like joy, when glades cease echoing The baying hound, no more compelled to cower In covert, doth the hind the forest scour, Panting for crystal rivulet or spring:  As I the sob acclaim that signifies Passion of love or awe divinely given, Or other ecstasy that God endears. Transported with her bliss the spirit cries; How vast his rapture who inhabits heaven, If joy he hath more joyful than these tears!"

The Cinque Cento period of Italian poetry, which to the men of that day seemed the ne plus ultra of artistic achievement, has since received less praise and exerted less influence than fairly its due. It was a great thing to have produced works so perfect in form, and to have refined the language in so eminent a degree. The general belief, too, that the Italian poetry of this age was devoid of all but formal excellence involves a great exaggeration. It is true that the literature of the period is overloaded with masses of mechanical and conventional stuff, but Guidiccioni and Casa and Tansillo are capable on occasion of expressing themselves with an energy the more impressive from being restrained within the limits prescribed by a chastened taste, and many Italian sonnets are even better fitted to be breathed from the trumpet than warbled to the lute. A great development in this direction might have been expected, but for the extinction of political and spiritual liberty.

What the Italian lyric might have become we see in Milton, who could have written neither his Lycidas nor his sonnets without Tuscan models. He undoubtedly weighted, without overweighting, both canzone and sonnet with thought to a degree unparalleled in Italy, but how much he owed to Italians appears by a comparison of