DESCRIPTIONS OF NATURE IN EARLY ITALIAN POETS 419 



if inebriated with their sweet fragrance, plunge back into the 

 stream, whilst others rise around them." It would almost 

 seem as if this fiction had its origin in the poet's recollection 

 of that peculiar and rare phosphorescent condition of the 

 ocean, when luminous points appear to rise from the breaking 

 waves, and spreading themselves over the surface of the waters, 

 convert the liquid plain into a moving sea of sparkling stars. 

 The remarkable conciseness of the style of the Divina Corn- 

 media adds to the depth and earnestness of the impression 

 which it produces. 



In lingering on Italian ground, although avoiding the fri- 

 gid pastoral romances, I would here refer after Dante to the 

 plaintive sonnet in which Petrarch describes the impression 

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

 death had robbed him of Laura; the smaller poems of Boiardo, 

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

 of Vittoria Colonna.* 



I do not make any extracts from the Canzones of the Vita Nuova, 

 because the similitudes and images which they contain do not belong to 

 the purely natural range of terrestrial phenomena. 

 * 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 Fracas- 

 toro 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. Fracastorii 

 Op. 1591, P. i. pp. 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. 1 miss with astonishment any expression 

 of feeling connected with the aspect of nature in the letters of Petrarch, 

 either when, in 1315, (three years, therefore, before the death of Laura), 

 he attempted the ascent of Mont Ventour from Vaucluse, 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 classical remem- 

 brances 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 Petrarclice Epist. de rebiis familiarilus, lib. iv. 1, v. 

 3 and 4- pp. 119, 156, and 161, ed. Lugdun. 1601). There is, how- 

 ever, an exceedingly picturesque description of a great tempest which 

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

 2 E 2 



