64 COSMOS 



made on his mind by the charming Valley of Vaucluse, after 

 death had robbed him of Lam*a ; the smaller poems of Boi- 

 ardo, the friend of Hercules d'Este ; and, more recently, the 

 stanzas of Vittoria Colonna.* 



When classical literature acquired a more generally-dif- 

 fused vigor by the intercourse suddenly opened with the po- 

 litically degenerated Greeks, we meet with the earliest evi- 

 dence of this better spirit in the works of Cardinal Bembo, 

 the friend and counselor of Raphael, and the patron of art ; 

 for in the JEtna Dialogue., written in the youth of the au- 

 thor, there is a charming and vivid sketch of the geographical 

 distribution of the plants growing on the declivities of the 

 mountain, from the rich corn-fields of Sicily to the snow-cov- 

 ered margin of the crater. The finished work of his raaturer 

 age, the Histoi-icE Venetce, characterizes still more picturesque- 

 ly the climate and vegetation of the New Continent. 



Every thing concurred at this period to fill the imagina- 

 tions of men with grand images of the suddenly-extended 

 boundaries of the known world, and of the enlargement of hu- 

 man powers, which had been of simultaneous occurrence. 

 As, in antiquity, the Macedonian expeditions to Paropanisus 

 and the wooded alluvial valleys of Western Asia awakened 

 impressions derived from the aspect of a richly-adorned exotic 

 nature, whose images were vividly reflected in the works of 



* I would here refer to Boiardo's sonnet, beginning, 



Ombrosa selva, che il mio duolo ascolti, 



and the fine stanzas of Vittoria Colonna, which begin, 



Quando miro la terra ornata e bella, 

 Di mille vaghi ed odorati fiori .... 



A fine and very characteristic description of the country seat of Fra- 

 castoro, on the hill of Incassi (Mons Caphius), near Verona, is given by 

 this writer (who was equally distinguished in medicine, mathematics, 

 and poetry), in his Naugerius de Poetica Dialogue. Hieron. Fracasto- 

 rii. Op. 1591, Part i., p. 321-326. See, also, in a didactic poem by the 

 same writer, lib. ii., v. 208-219 (Op., p. 636), the pleasing passage on 

 the culture of the Citrus in Italy. I miss with astonishment any ex- 

 pression of feeling connected with the aspect of nature in the letters 

 of Petrarch, either when, in 1345 (three years, therefore, before the 

 death of Laura), he attempted the ascent of Mont Ventour from Vau- 

 cluse, in the eager hope of beholding from thence a part of his native 

 land; when he ascended the banks of the Rhine to Cologne; or when 

 he visited the Gulf of Baiae. He lived more in the world of his classic- 

 al remembrances of Cicero and the Roman poets, or in the emotions of 

 his ascetic melancholy, than in the actual scenes by which he was sur- 

 rounded. (See Petrarch<B Epist. de Rebus Familiarihns, lib. iv., 1, v 

 3 and 4; p. 119, 156, and 161, ed. Lugdun., 1601). There is, howev 

 er, an exceedingly picturesque description of a great tempest which he 

 observed near Naples in 1343 (hb. v., 5, p. 165). 



