We are sorry we cannot recollect any more. It expresses the wish, which so many have felt, to live in retirement, and be devoted to the beauties of nature. Another passage, more generally known, turns also upon a very general feeling of regret—that of seeing spring-time reappear, unaccompanied with the joys we have lost. Guarini was safer in following his original into these sincere corners of the heart, than when he attempted to refute him with a boy’s copy-book. The passage is very beautiful, and no less popular:—
O Primavera, gioventù de l’ anno,
Bella madre de’ fiori,
D’ erbe novelle e di novelli amori,
Tu torni ben; ma teco
Non tornano i sereni
E fortunati di de le mie gioje:
Tu torni ben, tu torni,
Ma teco altro non torna
Che del perduto mio caro tesoro
La rimembranza misera e dolente:
Tu quella sei, tu quella,
Ch’ era pur dianzi si vezzosa e bella;
Ma non son io già quel ch’un tempo fui,
Sì caro a gli occhi altrui.
Pastor Fido, atto iii. sc. i.
O Spring, thou youthful beauty of the year,
Mother of flowers, bringer of warbling quires,
Of all sweet new green things and new desires,
Thou, Spring, returnest; but, alas! with thee
No more return to me
The calm and happy days these eyes were used to see.
Thou, thou returnest, thou,
But with thee returns now
Nought else but dread remembrance of the pleasure
I took in my lost treasure.
Thou still, thou still, art the same blithe, sweet thing
Thou ever wast, O Spring;
But I, in whose weak orbs these tears arise,
Am what I was no more, dear to another’s eyes.
The repetitions in this beautiful lament,
Tu torni ben, tu torni, &c.,
are particularly affecting. Perhaps the tone of them was caught from Ariosto:—
Non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso:
Quel ch’era Orlando, è morto, ed è sotterra.
Furioso, canto xxiii. st. 128.
No more, no more am I what I appear:
He that Orlando was, is dead and gone.
It is no critical violence at any time to pass from the Italian schools of poetry to those of our own country. They have always been closely connected, at least on the side of England, for the others knew little of their Northern admirers—men in whom Ariosto and Tasso would have delighted. Our language, till of late years, was not so widely spread as the Italian.
Our earliest pastoral poet of any name is Spenser; and a great name he is, though he was not a great pastoral poet. He was deeply intimate both with Greek and Italian pastoral; but in admiring Theocritus, and hoping to rival his natural language, he unwisely attempted to engraft the sweet fruit of the south on the rudest crab-apple of northern rusticity. Hence, in his only pastoral professing to be such, entitled the Shepherd’s Calendar, he has almost entirely failed. There are some touching lines in the story of the Fox and Kid, and a beautiful paraphrase of that of Cupid and the Fowler, from Bion; but in truth, with all his love of the woods and fields, for which he had a poet’s passion, and never could be without, Spenser was not qualified to excel as a purely pastoral writer. He was too learned for it, too full of the writers before him, and could not dispense with their chivalry and mythology. His words were Greek rather than English; or if English, they were the English of a former time. When Venus and the Graces were not there, he saw enchantresses and knights-errant. He always had visions, as Milton had, either of Jove or Proserpine, or of
Faery damsels met in forests wide
By knights of Logres and of Lyones,
Làncelot, or Pèlleas, or Pellenòre.
But this elevated him to the high ideal of the subject; and no man could have written so fine a pastoral as he, of the classical or romantic sort, had he set his luxuriant wits to it, instead of attempting to get up an uncouth dance with the “clouted shoon” of Hobbinol and Davie. He could have beaten Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and all. Under picturesque influences, he never failed to add beauty to beauty. In the original of the passage we have alluded to, which he imitated from Bion, (the story of Cupid and the Fowler,) Bion merely makes the young fowler take Cupid in the trees for a bird, and endeavour to ensnare him; ending with a pretty admonition, from an old master of the craft, not to persevere in his attempt, seeing that the bird in question was a very dangerous bird, and would come to him soon enough by-and-by of his own accord. In Spenser, Cupid has wings coloured like a peacock’s train; and after flashing out beautifully from the bushes to a tree, the little god leaps from bough to bough, and playfully catches the stones thrown at him in his hand. All the introductory details, too, which are full of truth, are Spenser’s:—