LITERATURE OF THE DAY.
Dante and his Circle; with the Italian Poets preceding him. Edited and translated in the original Metres by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Revised and rearranged edition, Boston: Roberts Bros.
Dante is so great a figure in Italian literature that he hides from sight the host of minor poets who preceded him, and throws his own contemporaries so into the shade that we are apt to think that Italian poetry began with him, and that its second exponent is Petrarch. Such a view is to be regretted, not only because it overlooks much that is in itself valuable, but because it attributes to a period of slow development a phenomenal character. There were many poets worth listening to before the great Florentine wrote the New Life or the Divine Comedy, and many whom he listened to and praised, although his prophetic foresight told him that he would one day bear their glory from them.
It was to make us acquainted with these forgotten singers that Mr. Rossetti wrote some years ago his charming book. The Early Italian Poets, which, after being long out of print, he now presents to us in a revised and rearranged edition. The author's wish is not merely to give us a glimpse of the quaint conceits of a school that continued in Italy the waning influence of the Troubadours, but to open to us the intimate social life of the literary men of that period as reflected in their vague Platonic rhapsodies, their friendly letters, their jests and quarrels, their joy and sadness. Interwoven with all this are stately canzoni, and dainty sonnets full of quaint conceits, like that wherein Jacopo da Lentino (1250) sings Of his Lady in Heaven:
I have it in my heart to serve God so
That into Paradise I shall repair—
The holy place through the which everywhere
I have heard say that joy and solace flow.
Without my lady I were loath to go—
She who has the bright face and the bright hair—