He who the song inspired prompts all who sing.”
As an impartial critic we must confess that, however refined the language, beautiful the sentiments, and learned the imagery, there is too much classical grandiloquence in her love-songs to permit us to forget the head that composed, and allow us to think only of the heart that inspired, them. When Pescara went forth on his first military expedition, she described her grief in a long rhymed letter of thirty-seven stanzas, in which all that is heroic in ancient Greece and Rome is summoned to witness her disconsolate state. The opening address—Eccelso Mio Signore! (My high-engendered Lord!)—while it shows the reverential homage which the wife in those days was expected to offer to her husband, and which, with all its formalism, was better than the disrespectful familiarity of a later age, is the prelude to a style altogether too much like that of the eccentric Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, whose biography of her husband—her Julius Cæsar, her thrice noble, high, and puissant Prince, as she used to call him—is the acme of connubial admiration. After the death of Pescara, Vittoria depicted her own grief and his great, good qualities in a flow of verses full of beauty, dignity, and pathos. Upwards of one hundred sonnets are devoted to his memory.
Trollope, with the conceit of his class, calls these touching expressions of sorrow “the tuneful wailings of a young widow as lovely as inconsolable, as irreproachable as noble”; but the more generous feelings and, doubtless, the Catholic instincts of her French biographer discover in this exquisite threnody a form of prayer to God for peace to the living and eternal rest to the dead. After seven years of widowhood a great change took place in her nature. She gave herself up entirely to higher influences; and the difference of style is remarkable between her worldly and her religious poems. The first are, as we have said, devoted to the love of a mortal object; the second to a divine dilection. This series is entitled Rime Spirituali. She begins it:
“Since a chaste love my soul has long detained
In fond idolatry of earthly fame,
Now to the Lord, who only can supply
The remedy, I turn …”—Sonnet 1.
And again we observe in the following production her resolve to abandon pagan allusions and confine her poetry to sublimer subjects:
“Me it becomes not henceforth to invoke
Or Delos or Parnassus; other springs,