Amongst those renderings specially admirable for translative excellence and inherent poetic merit may be mentioned Dante Alighieri's canzone beseeching Death for the life of Beatrice, the beautiful sestina dealing (according to the translator's conjecture) of the Lady Pietra degli Serovigni, with its unmediæval-like opening lines

"To the dim light and the large circle of shade

I have clomb, and to the whitening of the hills,
There where we see no colour in the grass"

and his bitter sonnet on fruitless love; the canzone A Dispute with Death, of Guido Cavalcanti; Cino's canzone on the death of Beatrice Portinari; Lapo Gianni's ballata for his Lady Lagia; Simone dall' Antella's prolonged sonnet on the last days of the Emperor Henry VII.; Giovanni Boccaccio's three beautiful sonnets, Nos. IV. V. and VI., the second (Of his Last Sight of Fiammetta) being that subsequently painted on the frame of Rossetti's A Vision of Fiammetta, with the first line altered to

"Mid glowing blossoms and o'er golden hair;"

Ciullo d'Alcamo's charming Dialogue between a Lover and Lady; the canzone by the Emperor Frederick II.; Guido Guinicelli's canzone Of the Gentle Heart, and that on his rashness in love; Jacopo da Lentino's naïve sonnet Of his Lady in Heaven, and others; Giacomino Pugliesi's pathetically beautiful canzone on his dead lady; Folgore da San Geminiano's interesting and picturesque seventeen sonnets on the months and week days, already referred to; Guido delle Colonne's canzone; that of Prinzivalle Doria; the highly picturesque prolonged sonnet of Niccolò degli Albizzi on the de

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feated troops entering Milan; Fazio degli Uberti's superb canzone on Angiola of Verona, which I shall refer to again shortly; Franco Sacchetti's charming ballata and amusing catches; and finally a short ballata by an anonymous poet, which I shall quote as a conclusion to this enumeration.

BALLATA.

Of True and False Singing.

A little wild bird sometimes at my ear
Sings his own little verses very clear:
Others sing louder that I do not hear.

For singing loudly is not singing well;
But ever by the song that's soft and low
The master-singer's voice is plain to tell.

Few have it, and yet all are masters now,
And each of them can trill out what he calls
His ballads, canzonets, and madrigals.

The world with masters is so covered o'er,
There is no room for pupils any more.

Regarding the canzone of Fazio degli Uberti-this exquisite love-song appears in most editions of the canzonieri of Dante, but there has been wide divergence of opinion on the right of its being there. Of modern commentators, Sir Theodore Martin in his introduction to the Vita Nuova considers it a portrait of Beatrice Portinari by the great author of the Commedia, but only on very conjectural grounds; while Rossetti, agreeing with such learned authorities as Ubaldini, Monti, and Fraticelli, the evidence of the last-named especially being of great moment, is of decided opinion that it is by the talented exile who in old age wrote the Dittamondo, or Song of the World. Whether by

Dante or Fazio it is beautiful in a high degree; and certainly it is difficult to commiserate the grandson of that Farinata degli Uberti of whom Dante speaks in the Inferno, if by his exile in Verona he indeed won such a bride as Angiola is described to be, the excellence of whose spiritual loveliness, we are told, is even greater than that of her bodily beauty.

CHAPTER V.

POEMS LYRICAL AND OTHERWISE.

To Rossetti's established position and strongly-marked influence in literature reference has already been made in the first chapter, and the scope of this chapter, which must necessarily be brief, will be confined entirely to a short consideration of the forty or fifty compositions which belong neither to his sonnet nor his ballad work, but which may be best classified as Poems, Lyrics, and Songs. In referring to these I shall not attempt any exact chronological arrangement as when describing the pictures, for the reason that where once right I should probably be twice wrong, there being only comparatively few written out of the period mentioned in the author's prefatory note (1847-1853); one or two are known as his earliest productions, and one or two as his later, and between the Alpha of The Blessed Damozel and the Omega of the two sonnets for the design of The Question (the sonnets he wrote for Mr. Theodore Watts's volume a week or two before his death), there are few poems bearing internal evidence of the exact date of their composition. In the first chapter I referred to three compositions, which, however, can find no place in any account of his writings for the reason that one is destroyed, one lost or destroyed, and one a boyish experiment which the author wished to remain unde

scribed, and from which it would, therefore, be unjust to quote; the first of these being the dramatic attempt entitled The Slave, said to be written at the age of five, or, according to his own statement, "somewhere about five;" the second being a mature production called The Wife's Tragedy, which only a very few have seen, and which was based upon a fact of the author's acquaintance; while the third is Sir Hugh the Heron, the only points of interest regarding which have been already noted.

It has already been shown that at sixteen Rossetti was strongly attracted to the poetry of Sir Walter Scott and the border and ballad literature, and that to this succeeded a strong admiration for that of Browning, as manifested about his twenty-first year in one or two early water-colours and an attempted large oil painting; but before he came of age in the legal sense of the term his influences were only the general ones of circumstance, country, education, and temperament, and a maturity of style was reached in The Blessed Damozel and My Sister's Sleep which far exceeded that attained by him in art at the corresponding dateindeed, the young poet may be said to have reached the platform of literary maturity while he was yet learning the grammar of painting.

Decidedly the first two poems of the Poems that were composed were The Blessed Damozel and My Sister's Sleep, but it will be more convenient to refer first to the longer compositions, these comprising (omitting Eden Bower, Troy Town, Sister Helen, etc., as ballads), The Bride's Prelude, Dante at Verona, A Last Confession, Jenny, The Burden of Nineveh, and The Stream's Secret—these, with the exception of the first-named, belonging to a