Which in English runs pretty exactly as follows:—
"Like to a hungry nestling bird, that hears
And sees the fluttering of his mother's wings
Bearing him food, whence, loving what she brings
And her no less, a joyful mien he wears,
And struggles in the nest, and vainly stirs,
Wishful to follow her free wanderings,
And thanks her in such fashion, while he sings,
That the free voice beyond his strength appears;
So I, whene'er the warm and living glow
Of him my sun divine, that feeds my heart,
Shine's brighter than its wont, take up the pen,
Urged by the force of my deep love; and so
Unconscious of the words unkempt by art
I write his praises o'er and o'er again."
The reader conversant with Italian poetry will have already seen enough to make him aware, that the Colonna's compositions are by no means, unkempt, unpolished, or spontaneous. The merit of them consists in the high degree, to which they are exactly the reverse of all this. They are ingenious, neat, highly studied, elegant, and elaborate. It may be true, indeed, that much thought was not expended on the subject matter; but it was not spared on the diction, versification, and form. So much so, that many of her sonnets were retouched, altered, improved, and finally left to posterity, in a form very different from that in which they were first handed round the literary world of Italy.[185] The file in truth was constantly in hand; though the nice fastidious care bestowed in dressing out with curious conceits a jejune or trite thought, which won the enthusiastic applause of her contemporaries, does not to the modern reader compensate for the absence of passion, earnestness, and reality.
Then, again, the declaration of the songstress of these would-be "wood notes wild," that they make no pretension to the meed of praise, nor care to escape contempt, nor are inspired by any hope of a life of fame after the author's death, leads us to contrast with such professions the destiny that really did,—surely not altogether unsought,—await these grief-inspired utterances of a breaking heart during the author's lifetime.
No sooner was each memory-born pang illustrated by an ingenious metaphor, or pretty simile packed neatly in its regulation case of fourteen lines with their complexity of twofold rhymes all right, than it was handed all over Italy. Copies were as eagerly sought for as the novel of the season at a nineteenth-century circulating library. Cardinals, bishops, poets, wits, diplomatists, passed them from one to another, made them the subject of their correspondence with each other, and with the fair mourner; and eagerly looked out for the next poetical bonne bouche which her undying grief and constancy to her "bel sole" should send them.
WOOD-NOTES WILD.
The enthusiasm created by these tuneful wailings of a young widow as lovely as inconsolable, as irreproachable as noble, learned enough to correspond with the most learned men of the day on their own subjects, and with all this a Colonna, was intense. Vittoria became speedily the most famous woman of her day, was termed by universal consent "the divine," and lived to see three editions of the grief-cries, which escaped from her "without her will."