Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/364

344 by the war between Savoy and Spain, and he turned to the ode to express his more masculine and elevated sentiments. He was almost certainly the author of the famous Pianto d'Italia, which in dignified and vibrating octaves portrayed the misery of Italy, and invoked the deliverance of Carlo Emanuele. In his first Poesie Liriche (1621) he was equally outspoken, and was in consequence banished from Modena. He found it safer formally to recant his too candid utterances, but his poetry remained thenceforward moral and elevated in cast. In an ode on the death of Lope de Vega he deplores the decadence of Italian song under the influence of Marino— "Non hà dunque Elicona              Per dilettar altro, ch' amplessi e baci?               Che Salmace nel fonte, Adon nel bosco?"

And his own odes, Horatian in form rather than Pindaric,— being composed, like Bernardo Tasso's, in verses of intermingled hendecasyllabics and septenars, with a preference for the longer line,—are on moral themes, the vanity of court life and delights of retirement, the dignity of virtue, and the consolations of song. Simplicity, sincerity, ardour, and clear effective evolution are the qualities which distinguish Testi's odes from Chiabrera's. In evolution, the essential quality of the elaborate and elevated ode, Chiabrera's are singularly weak. Ambitious flights are followed by prosaic lapses. Testi warms to his theme, and carries the reader easily forward through his swelling stanzas. The digressions are relevant, the close