"Chiare, fresche e dolci acque,"
and compare it with Boscan's
"Claros y frescos rios,"
written in imitation. The Italian poet invests his love with ideal imagery that elevates its object into something ethereal and goddess-like. How graceful, how full of true poetic fire and love's enthusiasm is that inimitable stanza!—
Still dear to Memory! when, in odorous showers,
Scattering their balmy flowers
To summer airs, th' o'ershadowing branches bow'd,
The while, with humble state,
In all the pomp of tribute sweets she sate,
Wrapt in the roseate cloud!
Now clustering blossoms deck her vesture's hem,
Now her bright tresses gem
(In all that blissful day,
Like burnish'd gold, with orient pearls inwrought):
Some strew the turf, some on the waters float!
Some, fluttering, seem to say,
In wanton circlets tost, "Here Love holds sovereign sway."
Boscan's poem has nothing of the ideal creativeness which sheds a halo round its object, making one feel as if Laura fed upon different food, and had limbs of more celestial texture than other women: but Boscan's sentiments are true to nature. His tenderness is that of a real and fervent lover; without raising her whom he loves into an angel, he gives us a lively and most sweet picture of how his heart was spent upon thoughts of her; and when he tells us that during absence he meditates on what she is doing, and whether she thinks of him, picturing her gesture as she laughs, thinking her thought, while his heart tells him how she may change from gay to sad, now sleeping and now awake, there is, in the place of the ideal, sincerity,—in place of the wanderings of fancy, the fixed earnestness of a fond and manly heart.
Boscan imitated Horace as well as Petrarch. In the epistle from which a passage has been quoted, he abides by the unornamented style of the Latin poet; but he wants his terseness, his epigrammatic turns, his keen observation. His poem is descriptive, and sweetly so, of the best state of man,—that of a happy marriage; but while he presents a faithful picture of its tranquil virtuous pleasures, and imparts the deep serene joy of his own heart, his hues are not stolen from the rainbow, nor his music from the spheres: it is all calm, earthly, unidealised, though not unimpassioned.
One fault Boscan possesses in common with almost all other Spanish poets—he cannot compress: he runs on, one idea suggesting another, one line the one to follow in artless unconstrained flow; but his poetry wants concentration and energy. You read with pleasure, and follow the meanders of his thoughts; they are not wild, but they are desultory; and we are never startled as when reading Petrarch, by the rising, as it were, amidst melodious sounds, of some structure of ideal and surpassing beauty, which makes you pause, imbibe the whole conception of the poet, and exclaim, This is perfection!
[11]Widen's Life of Garcilaso de la Vega: who gives us translations of some very pleasing Latin verses by Navagero.
[12]Wiffen's translation of Garcilaso's poems.