Quando sarà con suo gran sole unita,
Felice giorno! allor contenta fia;
Che sol nel viver suo conobbe vita."
SENTIMENTS IN HER POETRY.
Of which the subjoined rendering, prosaic and crabbed as it is, is perhaps hardly more so than the original.
"Sweet bond, that wast ordain'd so wondrous well
By the Almighty ruler of the sky,
Who did unite in one sweet loving tie
The godlike spirit and its fleshy shell,
I, while I praise his loving work, yet try—
Nor wish my thought from others to withhold—
To loose thy knot; nor more, through heat or cold,
Preserve thee, since in thee no joy have I.
Therefore my soul, shut in this dungeon stern,
Detests it as a foe; whence, all astray,
She lives not here, nor flies where she would go.
When to her glorious sun she shall return,
Ah! then content shall come with that blest day,
For she, but while he liv'd, a sense of life could know."
In considering the collection of 117 sonnets, from which the above specimens have been selected, and which were probably the product of about seven or eight years, from 1526 to 1533–4 (in one she laments that the seventh year from her husband's death should have brought with it no alleviation of her grief); the most interesting question that suggests itself, is,—whether we are to suppose the sentiments expressed in them to be genuine outpourings of the heart, or rather to consider them all as part of the professional equipment of a poet, earnest only in the work of achieving a high and brilliant poetical reputation? The question is a prominent one, as regards the concrete notion to be formed of the sixteenth-century woman, Vittoria Colonna; and is not without interest as bearing on the great subject of woman's nature.
Vittoria's moral conduct, both as a wife and as a widow, was wholly irreproachable. A mass of concurrent contemporary testimony seems to leave no doubt whatever on this point. More than one of the poets of her day professed themselves her ardent admirers, devoted slaves, and despairing lovers, according to the most approved poetical and Platonic fashion of the time; and she received their inflated bombast not unpleased with the incense, and answered them with other bombast, all en règle and in character. The "carte de tendre" was then laid down on the Platonic projection; and the sixteenth century fashion in this respect was made a convenient screen, for those to whom a screen was needful, quite as frequently as the less classical whimsies of a later period. But Platonic love to Vittoria was merely an occasion for indulging in the spiritualistic pedantries, by which the classicists of that day sought to link the infant metaphysical speculations then beginning to grow out of questions of church doctrine, with the ever-interesting subject of romantic love.