VOL. IV.

The Williams Quarterly.

WILLIAMSTOWN, DECEMBER, 1856.

No. II.

THE history of literature presents no epoch so eventful and so fascinating, as the period of, and immediately following, the Crusades.

When the tide of Asia's barbarian hordes swept over Europe, it not only overthrew the mighty fabric of the Roman empire, and desolated all the monuments of its glory, but it seemed to have laid a ban forever on the march of intellect, and the progress of civilization. For some time the art of letters had languished at Rome, the pure language of the Augustan age had become corrupted, and the eloquence of a Cicero and the muse of a Maro had ceased to echo in the forum, or to delight the ear of a Mæcenas; they had given place to luxury and licentiousness. And when the final catastrophe arrived, there was no commanding genius to rise superior to the shock, and, guiding his countrymen to the love of liberty, virtue, and science, warn them from their otherwise inevitable degradation. Long, long did mental darkness brood over the nations of christendom. The true faith, and perhaps true learning, glimmered awhile in the isolation of Iona in the north, and the monastic seclusion of Mt. Athos in the south, and then vanished in the superstition that closer

and closer enveloped, with one common obscurity, the various races of Europe.

But a keen discerner may perceive, amid all this torpor and apparent lifelessness, that intelligence was not entirely extinct; and that the human mind still struggled occasionally for the light. The rise of the feudal system had dotted the whole country, from the Oder to the Douro, with those baronial strongholds, whose ivied ruins excite the admiration of the traveler to this day. Time hung heavy on the hands of the nobles in those times, and hence sprung the jongleurs and minnesingers, who beguiled the hours with their songs of love and war. The deeds of the Cid, of King Arthur, and of Charlemagne and his Saladins, were a prolific theme for the mediaeval poet. Upon the verdant banks of the Rhine, those lays of the Niebelungenlied were composed and recited, which have been handed down to us in all their pristine beauty: and the skalds of the North Sea, and the ministrels of Wales, are proof that, poetry, at least, does not require a high state of enlightenment for its cultivation.

At the period when chivalry was at its height, there arose a voice from the Vatican, feeble at first, but swelling until its echoes pealed beyond the steeps of St. Bernard, shaking the Christian world to its foundations. That was the voice of Peter the Hermit, a dwarf in size, but a hero in intellect, and whose religious enthusiasm surpassed even his mental powers. He led the first Crusade; and year after year did the armies of the Cross follow in his steps, to find glory and destruction in the Holy Land. As the wounded and worn-out crusaders returned occasionally from these ill-fated emprises, and coasted, in the dreamy manner of those times, along the shores of sunny Provence, all the scenes of his childhood would rush before his eyes when he beheld the green vallies of his native land, and the hoary heads of the Alps glittering in the distance. Then he lifted up his voice and wept, and his joy found vent in the soothing expressions of poetry, like the passage bird that sings its return to its native grove. Having landed, he found the friends of his youth dead and gone, his patrimony wasted, and his lady love no more; so he wandered from castle to castle, and his romantesque strains were listened to with ardor and admiration, by many a martial knight and blushing maiden along the ancient Rhone. Such was the origin of the troubadour.

A little later, about fifty years after the last Crusade, our attention is drawn to a mournful scene at Ravenna, in Italy. A monk, shrouded in the cowl and mantle of the Franciscan order, is stretched for the last

time on his couch. His pale and haggard countenance, his glassy eyes, his skinny hands and wasted frame, mark him as the victim of harrowing sorrow and adversity. Only one or two friends are present to accompany him to the gates of death, and point his failing vision to hope beyond the grave. This is Danté, the greatest poet of modern times. Danté stands unique and pre-eminent among his cotemporaries, and all who for centuries had preceded him-a colossal genius! as the Sphinx rears its giant proportions unobstructed above the sands of Gizéh, while man appears insignificant in comparison. What a boundless power of imagination, and depth of feeling, were combined in his character. His Inferno has a gloomy grandeur about it, like that attaching to some weird Druidic forest. Now the ceaseless roar of the Phlegethon's bloody torrent resembles the tempest howling through the yew's funereal boughs; now the soft harpings of the angels remind one of the sweet music of the dribbling brook that waters the roots of the evergreens. The name of Danté is immortal!

Returning to a few years prior to the death of the great poet, we see a little child gambolling in the meadows, where the Arno washes the palaces of Florence, His childish beauty wins our sympathies, and we keep our eye on him: a little later he is found, a youth of singular promise and ability, dwelling at Avignon, a city in the south of France. This is FRANCESCO PETRARCHA, next to Danté the most fertile poet of his time he will be the subject of the following pages.

Avignon and its vicinity was, for the greater part of his life, the residence of Petrarch. In the poet's time it was the seat of the Holy See, and the presence of the popes raised the city to a degree of magnificence it has possessed at no other period. Sumptuousness, and levity of manners, were the characteristics of the Avignonians, and costly pageants, and imposing processions, were witnessed daily in their streets. The city is situated on the brow of an eminence, that rises majestically from the midst of the lovely plains of Languedoc. Its battlements skirt the shores of the ancient Rhone, which glides through meadows teeming with almost perennial verdure, until it is lost in the distance, where the blue mountains of Vaucluse loom above the horizon. The fountain of Vaucluse, with its yawning cavern, its foaming flood, salubrious air, and delightful solitude, was ever Petrarch's favorite summer retreat, and the scene of some of the sweetest inspirations of his muse.

In his earlier years, Francesco was remarkably handsome, and nature endowed him with pleasing and affable manners, which gained him many

and lasting friends. His retiring disposition warned him from the follies of the age, and taught him to seek in peace and seclusion, in the companionship of Virgil, Tully, and Horace, his chief enjoyment.

Although taken from his native land while a boy, yet he never ceased to cherish a deep interest in his beloved Italy; he mourned over the calamities that had reduced her to her wretched condition, rejoiced in the auspicious rise of Rienzi, and wept his untimely ruin.

But the most interesting episode in the life of Petrarch was his passion for Laura, a name indissolubly connected with his. To her, as he confessed, he owed all his fame, his happiness, and his sorrows. For years

she sought to check the ardor of his love, and affected coldness and displeasure but not always could such a gentle soul as hers remain an indifferent witness to constancy like his. Insensibly her heart learned to beat at his approach, and to long for his presence. When he departed for Rome, the deep expression of her clear, dark eye, spoke a silent farewell, and she pined during his absence, like a turtle dove for its mate; when he returned, the same soft eye uttered a welcome, silent, but thrilling. Her conduct, however, was above reproach; the tongue of slander never sullied the pure fame of Laura de Sâde. A halo of angelic purity seemed to hover around her pensively beautiful countenance, as she moved uncontaminated amid the dissolute circles of the Papal court. She resembled the sweet unobtrusive violet, growing uninjured in a bed of flaring tulips. For twenty years Laura was the polar star of Petrarch's life. But her constitution gradually declined, she was too fair, too frail for this earth to own; it was, however, the plague, at that time desolating Europe, that claimed her as its victim. Petrarch was in Italy when the mournful intelligence reached him. From that hour life was a burden, existence a weight, to him "that longed to go." And when at threescore and ten the shadow of death dimmed his eyes, as a cloud darkens the setting sun, his soul passed away without a murmur to the spirit land. It is in his literary career, however, that Petrarch more particularly claims our attention. Without hesitation we assign to him the first place in the second order of Italy's poets. Danté is, to make use of a trite figure, the keystone in her noble structure of poetical fame, holding the same rank in her literature, which Michael Angelo holds in her arts. They are twin Titans! both sublime in conception, they are equally successful in imparting their lofty imaginations to their works. Nor do we think ourselves much out of the way in comparing the two; for the poet and the artist are one. The only difference is, that the former appeals

to the soul by means of the ear, the other by means of the eye. It was poetry of the most exalted kind which inspired Danté with his description of Malebolgé, and roused Michael Angelo to the creation of his painting of the Last Judgment.

On the other hand, Petrarch and Raphael were kindred spirits. While neither claimed the mighty powers of their two predecessors, yet each, in his peculiar line, possessed a depth of soul, an exquisite sweetness and finish of expression, that exerted an extensive and beneficial influence on European literature and art. And here we have an instance of the similarity of thought which unites the poet and the artist. It was not simply ideals that Raphael sought to delineate on the canvas, but ever there hovered before his vision the image of his mother, the mother of his boyhood, and in the heavenly and entrancing beauty of his Madonnas, memory and filial affection traced the expression of her beloved countenance. And thus it was with Petrarch; when the "fine frenzy" inspired him, Laura's gentle form haunted his imagination, and his shell was tuned to celebrate her beauty and his love. In both cases it was the affections of the heart, one of the chief elements of poetry, which produced the effect.

Although, in point of date, the first of Italy's modern poets, yet Dante's writings have exerted no great influence, in the way of transforming or improving a language, or creating a new school of poetry. Wrapt up in the sublime figments of his brain, he disdained, or perhaps forgot, to clothe his thoughts with the ornaments of an elegant style, but, content to help himself, according to his exigencies, from any of the thousand and one then existing dialects of Italy, gave his conceptions to the world in all their original grandeur and ruggedness, to speak for themselves. As it is now, we regard his poem with the same feelings that we should gaze at the snow-capt peaks of Mt. Lebanon, whose abrupt and desolate crags, if rounded off and covered with forests, would be shorn of their picturesque beauty and wild sublimity.

But Petrarch, the opposite of his great prototype, labored to improve and remodel his mother tongue, and in the melody of his versification, and the elegance of his diction, resembles our Pope. And yet how incomparably superior is he to the English bard! for the Italian wrote from the overflowings of a wounded and bursting heart, and the language that enriches his ideas is far more mellifluous and poetical than the Anglo Saxon.

Petrarch's "Africa," an epic narrative of the conquests of Scipio