Of which the following is an inadequate but tolerably faithful translation:
"The angels to eternal bliss preferred,
Long on this day a painful death to die,
Lest in the heavenly mansions of the sky
The servant be more favoured than his Lord.
Man's ancient mother weeps the deed, this day
That shut the gates of heaven against her race,
Weeps the two piercèd hands, whose work of grace,
Refinds the path, from which she made man stray.
The sun his ever-burning ray doth veil;
Earth and sky tremble; ocean quakes amain,
And mountains gape, and living rocks are torn.
The fiends, on watch for human evil, wail
The added weight of their restraining chain.
Man only weeps not; yet was weeping born."
UNCERTAINTY OF ORTHODOXY.
As the previous extracts from the works of Vittoria have been, as has been stated, selected principally with a view to prove her Protestantism, it is fair to observe, that there are several sonnets addressed to the Virgin Mary, and some to various Saints, from which (though they are wholly free from any allusion to the grosser superstitions that Rome encourages her faithful disciples to connect with these personages), it is yet clear that the writer believed in the value of saintly intercession at the throne of grace. It is also worth remarking, that she nowhere betrays the smallest consciousness that she is differing in opinion from the recognised tenets of the Church, unless it be found, as was before suggested, in an occasional obscurity of phrase, which seems open to the suspicion of having been intentional. The great majority of these poems, however, were in all probability composed before the Church had entered on her new career of persecution. And as regards the ever-recurring leading point of "justification by grace," it was impossible to say exactly how far it was orthodox to go in the statement of this tenet, until Rome had finally decided her doctrine by the decrees of the Council of Trent.
One other remark, which will hardly fail to suggest itself to the modern reader of Vittoria's poetry, may be added respecting these once celebrated and enthusiastically received works. There is not to be discovered throughout the whole of them one spark of Italian, or patriotic feeling. The absence of any such, must, undoubtedly, be regarded only as a confirmation of the fact asserted in a previous chapter, that no sentiment of the kind was then known in Italy. In that earlier portion of her works, which is occupied almost exclusively with her husband's praises, it is hardly possible that the expression of such feelings should have found no place, had they existed in her mind. But it is a curious instance of the degree to which even the better intellects of an age are blinded by, and made subservient to, the tone of feeling and habits of thought prevalent around them, that it never occurs to this pure and lofty-minded Vittoria, in celebrating the prowess of her hero, to give a thought to the cause for which he was drawing the sword. To prevail, to be the stronger, "to take great cities," "to rout the foe," appears to be all that her beau ideal of heroism required.