so that he still left a small collection of poems, which the faithful widow of Boscan, finding among her husband’s papers, published at the end of his works as a Fourth Book, and has thus rescued what would otherwise probably have been lost. Their character is singular, considering the circumstances under which they were written; for, instead of betraying any of the spirit that governed the main course of their author’s adventurous life and brought him to an early grave, they are remarkable for their gentleness and melancholy, and their best portions are in a pastoral tone breathing the very sweetness of the fabulous ages of Arcadia. When he wrote most of them we have no means of determining with exactness. But with the exception of three or four trifles that appear mingled with other similar trifles in the first book of Boscan’s works, all Garcilasso’s poems are in the Italian forms, which we know were first adopted, with his coöperation, in 1526; so that we must, at any rate, place them in the ten years between this date and that of his death.
They consist of thirty-seven sonnets, five canzones, two elegies, an epistle in versi sciolti less grave than the rest of his poetry, and three pastorals; the pastorals constituting more than half of all the verse he wrote. The air of the whole is Italian. He has imitated Petrarch, Bembo, Ariosto, and especially Sannazaro, to whom he has once or twice been indebted for pages together; turning, however, from time to time, reverently to the greater ancient masters, Virgil and Theocritus, and acknowledging their supremacy. Where the Italian tone most prevails, something of the poetical spirit which should sustain him is lost. But, after all, Garcilasso was a poet of no common genius. We see it sometimes even in the strictest of his imitations; but it reveals itself much more distinctly when, as in the first Eclogue, he uses as servants the masters to whom he elsewhere devotes himself, and writes only like a Spaniard, warm with the peculiar national spirit of his country.
This first Eclogue is, in truth, the best of his works. It is beautiful in the simplicity of its structure, and beautiful in its poetical execution. It was probably written at Naples. It opens with an address to the father of the famous Duke of Alva, then viceroy of that principality, calling upon him, in the most artless manner, to listen to the complaints of two shepherds, the first mourning the faithlessness of a mistress, and the other the death of one. Salicio, who represents Garcilasso, then begins; and when he has entirely finished, but not before, he is answered by Nemoroso, whose name indicates that he represents Boscan.[781] The whole closes naturally and gracefully with a description of the approach of evening. It is, therefore, not properly a dialogue, any more than the eighth Eclogue of Virgil. On the contrary, except the lines at the opening and the conclusion, it might be regarded as two separate elegies, in which the pastoral tone is uncommonly well preserved, and each of which, by its divisions and arrangements, is made to resemble an Italian canzone. An air of freshness and even originality is thus given to the structure of the entire pastoral, while, at the same time, the melancholy, but glowing, passion that breathes through it renders it in a high degree poetical.
In the first part, where Salicio laments the unfaithfulness of his mistress, there is a happy preservation of the air of pastoral life by a constant, and yet not forced, allusion to natural scenery and rural objects, as in the following passage:—
For thee, the silence of the shady wood
I loved; for thee, the secret mountain-top,
Which dwells apart, glad in its solitude;
For thee, I loved the verdant grass, the wind
That breathed so fresh and cool, the lily pale,
The blushing rose, and all the fragrant treasures