Thou, Maiden, art the Siren of the sea,
Who with thy songs dost hold and fetter me.
It is rarely indeed that we can trace a couple of these lyrics to the same brain—we may not say "to the same hand," for the folk-poet's hand is taken up with striking the anvil or guiding the plough; to more intellectual uses he does not put it—yet expressing as they do emotions which are not only the same at bottom, but are here felt and regarded in precisely the same way, there results so much unity of design and execution, that, as we read, unawares the songs weave themselves into slight pastoral idylls—typical peasant romances in which real contadini speak to us of the new life wrought in them by love. Even the repeated mention of the Sicilian diminutives of the names of Salvatore and Rosina helps the illusion that a thread of personal identity connects together many of the fugitive canzuni. Thus we are tempted to imagine Turiddu and Rusidda as a pair of lovers dwelling in the sunny Conca d'Oro—he "so sweet and beautiful a youth, that God himself must surely have fashioned him"—a youth with "black and laughing eyes, and a little mouth from whence drops honey:" she a maiden of
. . . quattordicianni,
L'occhi cilestri e li capiddi biunni—
"fourteen years, celestial eyes, blonde hair;" to see her long tresses "shining like gold spun by the angels," one would think "that she had just fallen out of Paradise." "She is fairer than the foam of the sea"—
"My little Rose in January born,
Born in the month of cold and drifted snow,
Its whiteness stays thy beauty to adorn,