One whole volume of La Casa's collected works is devoted to his official and familiar correspondence, composed in choice but colorless Italian.[331] Another contains his Italian and Latin poems. No poet of the century expressed his inner self more plainly than La Casa in his verse. The spectacle is stern and grave. From the vocabulary of the Tuscan classics he seems to have chosen the gloomiest phrases, to adumbrate some unknown terror of the soul.[332] Sometimes his sonnets, in their vivid but polished grandeur, rise even to sublimity, as when he compares himself to a leafless wood in winter, beaten by fiercer storms, with days more cold and short in front, and with a longer night to follow.[333] It is a cheerless prospect of old age and death, uncomforted by hope, unvisited by human love. The same shadow, intensified by even a deeper horror of some coming doom, rests upon another sonnet in which he deplores his wasted life.[334] It drapes, as with a funeral pall, the long majestic ode describing his early errors and the vanity of worldly pomp.[335] It adds despair to his lines on jealousy, intensity to his satire on Court-life, and incommunicable sadness to the poems of his love.[336] Very judicious were the Italian critics who pronounced his style too stern for the erotic muse. We find something at once sinister and solemn in his mood. The darkness that envelops him, issues from the depth of his own heart. The world around is bright with beautiful women and goodly men; but he is alone, shut up with fear and self-reproach. Such a voice befits the age, as we learn to know it in our books of history, far better than the light effusions of contemporary rhymsters. It suits the black-robed personages painted by Moroni, whose calm pale eyes seem gazing on a world made desolate, they know not why. Its accents are all the more melancholy because La Casa yielded to no impulses of rage. He remained sober, cold, sedate; but by some fatal instinct shunned the light and sought the shade. The gloom that envelops him is only broken by the baleful fires of his Capitoli. That those burlesque verses, of which I shall speak in another place, were written in his early manhood, and that the Rime were perhaps the composition of his age, need not prevent us from connecting them together. The dreariness of La Casa's later years may well have been engendered by the follies of his youth. It is the despondency of exhaustion following on ill-expended energy, the tædium vitæ which fell on Italy when she awoke from laughter.

In illustration of the foregoing remarks I have translated six of La Casa's sonnets, which I shall here insert without further comment.[337] In point of form, Italian literature can show few masterpieces superior to the first and second.

Sweet woodland solitude, that art so dear
To my dark soul lost in doubt's dreadful maze,
Now that the North-wind, these short sullen days,
Wraps earth and air in winter's mantle drear,
And thy green ancient shadowy locks are sere,
White as my own, above the frosty ways,
Where summer flowers once basked beneath heaven's rays,
But rigid ice now reigns and snows austere;
Pondering upon that brief and cloudy light
That's left for me, I walk, and feel my mind
And members, like thy branches, frozen too;
Yet me, within, without, worse frost doth bind,
My winter brings a fiercer East-wind's blight,
A longer darkness, days more cold, more few.
O Sleep, O tranquil son of noiseless Night,
Of humid, shadowy Night; O dear repose
For wearied men, forgetfulness of woes
Grievous enough the bloom of life to blight!
Succor this heart that hath outgrown delight,
And knows no rest; these tired limbs compose;
Fly to me, Sleep; thy dusky vans disclose
Over my languid eyes, then cease thy flight.
Where, where is Silence, that avoids the day?
Where the light dreams, that with a wavering tread
And unsubstantial footing follow thee?
Alas! in vain I call thee; and these gray,
These frigid shades flatter in vain. O bed,
How rough with thorns! O nights, how harsh to me!
It was my wont by day to seek the grove
Or grot or font, soothing my soul with song,
Weaving sweet woes in rhyme, and all night long
To watch the stars with Phœbus and with Love;
Nor, Bernard, did I fear with thee to rove
That sacred mount where now few poets throng:
Till like sea-billows, uncontrollably strong,
Me too the vulgar usage earthward drove;
And bound me down to tears and bitter life,
Where fonts are not, nor laurel boughs, nor shade,
But false and empty honor stirs vain strife.
Now, not unmixed with envious regret,
I watch thee scale yon far-off heights, where yet
No footstep on the sward was ever laid.
While mid low-lying dells and swampy vales
Those troubled ghosts and dreams my feet delay,
Which hide 'neath gems and gold and proud array
The barb of poison that my heart impales;
Thou on the heights that virtue rarely scales,
By paths untrodden and a trackless way,
Wrestling for fame with thine own soul, dost stray,
Free o'er yon hills no earth-born cloud assails.
Whence I take shame and sorrow, when I think
How with the crowd in this low net accursed
I fell, and how 'tis doomed that I shall die.
O happy thou! Thou hast assuaged thy thirst!
Not Phœbus but grief dwells with me, and I
Must wait to purge my woes on Lethe's brink.
Now pomps and purple, now clear stream or field
Seeking, I've brought my day to evensong,
Profitless, like dry fern or tares, the throng
Of luckless herbs that no fair fruitage yield.
Wherefore my heart, false guide on this vain quest,
More than a smitten flint strikes spark and flame;
So dulled a spirit must she bring with shame
To Him who placed it bright within my breast.
Poor heart! She well deserves to chafe and burn
Since her so precious and so noble freight,
Ill-governed, she to loss and woe doth turn!
Nor 'neath the North-wind do the branches quake
On yonder bristling oak-trees, as I shake
Fearing that even repentance comes too late.
Heart-ache, that drawest nutriment from fear,
And still through growing fear dost gather power;
That mingling ice with flame, confusion drear
And fell disaster on love's realm dost shower!
Forth from my breast, since all thy bitter cheer
With my life's sweet thou'st blent in one brief hour!
Hence to Cocytus! Where hell drinks each tear
Of tortured souls, self-plagued, self-loathing, cower!
There without rest thy dolorous days drag out,
Thy dark nights without slumber! Smart thy worst
No less with felt pangs than fictitious doubt!
Avaunt! Why fiercer now than at the first,
Now when thy venom runs my veins throughout,
Bring'st thou on those black wings new dreams accurst?

The vicissitudes of Italy during the first half of the sixteenth century were so tragic, and her ruin was so near at hand, that we naturally seek some echo of this anguish in the verses of her poets. Nothing, however, is rarer than to find direct allusion to the troubles of the times, or apprehension of impending danger expressed in sonnet or canzone. While following Petrarch to the letter, the purists neglected his odes to Rienzi and the Princes of Italy. His passionate outcry, Italia mia, found no response in their rhetoric. Those sublime outpourings of eloquence, palpitating with alternate hopes and fears, might have taught the poets how to write at least the threnody of Rome or Florence. Had they studied this side of their master's style, the gravity of the matter supplied them by the miseries of their country, might have immortalized their purity of style. As it was, they preferred the Rime in Vita e Morte di Madonna Laura, and sang of sentiments they had not felt, while Italy was dying. Only here and there, as in the somber rhymes of La Casa, the spirit of the age found utterance unconsciously. But for the mass of versifiers it was enough to escape from the real agonies of the moment into academical Arcadia, to forget the Spaniard and the Frenchman in Philiroe's lap with Ariosto, or to sigh for a past age of gold:[338]

O rivi, o fonti, o fiumi, o faggi, o querce,
Onde il mondo novello ebbe suo cibo
In quel tranquilli secoli dell'oro:
Deh come ha il folle poi cangiando l'esca,
Cangiato il gusto! e come son questi anni
Da quei diversi in povertate e 'n guerra!

This makes the occasional treatment of political subjects the more valuable; and we hail the patriotic poems of Giovanni Guidiccioni as a relief from the limpid nonsense of the amourists. Born at Lucca in 1500, he was made Bishop of Fossombrone by Paul III., and died in 1541. Contemporaries praised him for the grandeur of his conceptions and the severity of his diction, while they censured the obscurity that veiled his unfamiliar thoughts. "In those songs," writes Lilius Giraldus, "which he composed upon the woes and miseries of Italy, he set before his readers ample proofs of his illustrious style."[339] One sonnet might be chosen from these rhymes, reproving the Italians for their slavery and shame, and pointing to the cause, now irremediable, of their downfall:[340]

From deep and slothful slumber, where till now
Entombed thou liest, waken, breathe, arise!
Look on those wounds with anger in thine eyes,
Italia, self-enslaved in folly's slough!
The diadem of freedom from thy brow
Torn through thine own misdoing, seek with sighs;
Turn to the path, that straight before thee lies,
From yonder crooked furrow thou dost plow.
Think on thine ancient memories! Thou shalt see
That those who once thy triumphs did adorn,
Have chained thee to their yoke with fetters bound.
Foe to thyself, thine own iniquity,
With fame for them, for thee fierce grief and scorn,
To this vile end hath forced thee, Queen discrowned!