Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/177

Rh But it was in Italy, in the "dolce stil nuovo" of Guido Guinicelli and Dante, that the "metaphysical" element first appeared in love-poetry. "Learning," says Adolf Gaspary. "is the distinctive feature of the new school." Writing first in the Troubadour fashion of the Sicilians, it was with the famous canzone "Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore" that Guinicelli began to write in the metaphysical manner. "The change in his poetry took place under the influence of science. Philosophy, which in that age when Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventura were teaching had again come to be regarded with favour, penetrated even into poetry, which drew from it its subject-matter, and even the manner of its exposition." The high-priest of this ideal, metaphysical, abstract love-poetry was Dante. Petrarch brought love-poetry back to closer touch with ordinary human nature. His finer psychology made Petrarch "the first of the moderns"; on the other hand, his subtle and refined compliments contained the germ, and more than the germ, of what in subsequent sonneteers took the place of Dante's philosophy and Petrarch's psychology—a kind of pseudo-metaphysics which elaborated in abstract and hyperbolical fashion every metaphor, natural or traditional to the theme of love. But the sonnet never lost the cast which it acquired from its origin in this combination of high passion and scholastic philosophy—a strain of subtle thought, a readiness to