Like rose-hued sea-flowers toward the heat No flower-bells that expand and shrink II. A baby's hands, like rosebuds furled, Ope if you touch, though close upcurled, Then, even as warriors grip their brands They close, clenched hard like tightening bands. No rosebuds yet by dawn impearled Match, even in loveliest lands, III. A baby's eyes, ere speech begin, A baby's eyes. Love, while the sweet thing laughs and lies, Lies perfect in their paradise. Their glance might cast out pain and sin, Their speech make dumb the wise; By mute glad godhead felt within A baby's eyes. JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS. SYMONDS, JOHN ADDINGTON, a distinguished English poet and critic; born at Bristol, October 5, 1840; died at Rome, April 19, 1893. He was educated at Harrow School and at Oxford. Delicate health for many years compelled him to reside in a warm climate, principally in Italy and Switzerland, and most of his works the earliest of which appeared in 1872- are upon Italian subjects. In verse he has published "Sonnets of Michelangelo and Campanella;" a volume of "Sonnets on the Thought of Death;" "Many Moods;" "New and Old." His prose works are "Introduction to the Study of Dante" (1872); "Studies of the Greek Poets' (1873-76); "The Renaissance in Italy" (1875-86); "Sketches in Italy and Greece;" "Italian By-Ways;" and the lives of Shelley and Sir Philip Sidney, in the "English Men of Letters" series. The seventh and last volume of his work on the Italian Renaissance was published in 1886. "In the Key of Blue" and "Walt Whitman were published after his death, in 1893. THE INVASION OF ITALY BY CHARLES VIII. OF FRANCE. (From “History of the Renaissance in Italy.") WHAT was this beautiful land in the midst of which the French found themselves, a land whose marble palaces were thronged with cut-throats in disguise, whose princes poisoned while they smiled, whose luxuriant meadows concealed fever, whose ladies carried disease upon their lips? To the captains and the soldiery of France, Italy already appeared a splendid and fascinating Circe, arrayed with charms, surrounded with illusions, hiding behind perfumed thickets her victims changed to brutes, and building the couch of her seduction on the bones of murdered men. Yet she was so beautiful that, halt as they might for a moment and gaze back with yearning on the Alps that they had crossed, they found themselves unable to resist her smile. Forward they must march through the garden of enchantment; henceforth taking the precaution to walk with drawn sword, and like Orlando in Morgana's park, to stuff their casques with roses that they might not hear the siren's voice too clearly. It was thus that Italy began the part she played through the Renaissance for the people of the North. "The White Devil of Italy" is the title of one of Webster's best tragedies. A white devil, - a radiant daughter of sin and death, holding in her hands the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and tempting the nations to eat, this is how Italy struck the fancy of the men of the sixteenth century. She was feminine, and they were virile; but she could teach and they must learn. She gave them pleasure; they brought force. The fruit of her embraces with the nations was the spirit of modern culture, the genius of the age in which we live. Two terrible calamities warned the Italians with what new enemies they had to deal. Twice at the commencement of the invasion did the French use the sword which they had drawn to intimidate the sorceress. These terror-striking examples were the massacres of the inhabitants of Rapallo on the Genoese Riviera, and of Fivizzano in Lunigiana. Soldiers and burghers, even prisoners and wounded men in the hospitals, were butchered, first by the Swiss and German guards, and afterwards by the French, who would not be outdone by them in energy. It was thus that the Italians, after a century of bloodless battles and parade campaigning, learned a new art of war, and witnessed the first act of those Apocalyptic tragedies which were destined to drown the peninsula with French, Spanish, German, Swiss, and native blood. Meanwhile the French host had reached Parma; traversing, all through the golden autumn weather, those plains where mulberry and elm are married by festoons of vines above a billowy expanse of maize and corn. From Parma placed beneath the northern spurs of the Apennines, to Sarzana on the western coast of Italy, where the marbles of Carrara build their barrier against the Tyrrhene Sea, there leads a winding barren mountain pass. Charles took this route with his army, and arrived in the beginning of November before the walls of Sarzana. Meanwhile we may well ask what Piero de' Medici had been doing, and how he had fulfilled his engagement with Alfonso. He had undertaken, it will be remembered, to hold the passes of the Apennines upon this side. To have embarrassed the French troops among those limestone mountains, thinly forested with pine and chestnut trees, and guarded here and there with ancient VOL. XIX.--13 |
