Tenant un voile afin d'aller au gré du vent
Des aisles aux costez pour voler bien avant.
Shakespeare had the Emblematist's Fortune in his mind when he wrote: "Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning, and inconstant, and mutability, and variation: and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls."
In hands less light than Cousin's, it was easy for the Fortune of the emblem writers to become grotesque, and to lose all artistic merit. The Italian Fortuna does not in the least lend herself to caricature. In Italy, the objects of thought, even of the common people, have the tendency to assume concrete and æsthetic forms—a fact of great significance in the history of a people destined to render essential service to art.
The "tall, beautiful lady" of the Sicilian story, reappears in a series of South Italian folk-songs which contains further evidence of this unconsciously artistic instinct. The Italian folk-poet, for the most part, lets the lore of tradition altogether alone. It does not lie in his province, which is purely lyrical. But he has seized upon Fortune as a myth very capable of lyrical treatment, and following the free bent of his genius, he has woven out of his subject the delicate fancies of these songs. A series in the sense of being designed to form a consecutive whole, they, of course, are not. No two, probably, had the same author; the perfect individuality of the figure presented, only showing how a type may be so firmly fixed that the many have no difficulty in describing it with the consistency of one man who draws the creation of his own brain.
I.
Once in the gloaming, Fortune met me here;
Fair did she seem, and Love was on me laid,
Her hair was raised, as were it half a sphere,
Flowered on her breast a rose that cannot fade.