NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

THE works of Fraticelli have been mentioned in the Preface as indispensable to the student of the Lyrical Poems of Dante. There are many other works which are most desirable; and an enumeration of them, with characters and specimens of each, may be seen in the recent excellent edition of the Vita Nuova, by Alessandro Torri (Livorno, 1843). From them, and from the labours of Professor Rossetti, it were an easy task to select notes that might fill a volume, which the critic would admit to be useful and highly interesting; but I fear it would be very unprofitable to an English publisher. At all events, it would be unsuitable to the present publication, which can afford but few pages for illustrations; and these shall be devoted, therefore, chiefly to matter connected with Dante, that is not to be found elsewhere.

VITA NUOVA.

SONETTO I.-Three answers only to this Sonnet, from contemporary poets-Cavalcante,* Cino, and Dante da Majano, have been preserved. That by Cino da Pistoja is as follows:

Naturalmente chere ogni amadore.
Nature prompts every lover to impart
Unto his lady-love his heart's desire;
A truth, which in the vision you relate,
'Twas Love's intention to recall to you.
This he expressed, when with humility
He fed your lady with your burning heart,

See p. 2, Vedesti, al mio, &c.

Who, in his mantle wrapt, had long enjoyed
Freedom from every care in gentle sleep;
Love showed his joy, as he advanced to you,
To give you that which most your heart desired,
In the combining two fond hearts in one;
And knowing well the pains of love and cares
That were engendered in the lady's breast,
He pitied her, and went his way in tears.

The reply of Dante da Majano is as follows :—

Di ciò che stato sei dimandatore.

To you, my friend, unknowing in such matters,
I send a brief reply to your request;

With my opinion on your wondrous dream;
Exhibiting its import faithfully.

This, at your service then, is my response.
Should you be sound in body, sane in mind,
Then copiously your stomach lave and cleanse,
The vapours to extinguish and expel
Which generate such dreams and idle whims;
But if you labour under sore disease

I really must suppose your brain disordered.
Thus do I tender you my written thoughts;
Nor will my judgment change until I learn
What light the doctor's aqueous test affords.

This coarse production, and the better verses of Cino and of Cavalcante, are of some value, as they seem to show that the writers had no idea of the mysteries concerning Beatrice, in the first sonnet of the Vita Nuova, which are imagined by Professor Rossetti, (see Sp. Antip. 318, Am. Plat. p. 319, 457, 1265). Some years ago (May, 1834) I sent the following lines to Professor Rossetti, as a supposed answer to Dante by one who considered that he had merely to interpret a lover's dream, and invited him to compose one of an opposite character, expressing the mysterious sense which Dante intended to convey.

In reply to Sonnet I., Vita Nuova.

Dante, thy mystic dream appears to me
A faithful, shadowy picture of the state

Of youthful poet ardently in love,

Who hopes and doubts and joys and weeps by turns.
Love, filled with joy, oft comes at night's still hour
And shows the lady to his raptured mind;
He sees an angel form, unveiled as truth,
Artless as sleep, in Love's own vesture robed;
Then fondly dreams she wakes to Love and him,
And takes the humble offering of his heart
With virgin fear, and lives on it alone.

Blest is he then, nor change nor ill forebodes;
But Love is wayward as an April morn,

And clouds and showers succeed brief gleams of joy.

Professor Rossetti, in return, with the readiness of an improvisatore, in which talent his power is very remarkable, sent me immediately the following sonnet, in the same rhymes as that of Dante, and desired it to be imagined the reply of a sound Catholic, who saw with displeasure the same antipapal spirit (though skilfully concealed) in the Lyrical Poems of Dante, as is shown without disguise in the Commedia.

SONETTO.

Ben al membrar l'essenzia dell' Amore

Che si t'apparve, orror n' ha la tua mente!
Chè quando essenzia tal fu altrui parvente
Morte ne venne sempre all' amatore.
Le sette stelle t' atterzaron l'ore

Per fare alto mistero a te presente,

Mistero è Amor, Madonna, e 'l cor ardente,
Mistero è il drappo, il gaudio ed il dolore.
Tai mistiche figure io ben comprendo,
Ma rivelarne altrui l' interna idea
Gran misfatto saria, misfatto orrendo !
E chi gl' intende appien com' io gl' intendo,
Preso da quel orror che il cor t' empiea
Ai detti tuoi risponderà tacendo.

The following is a literal translation :

Dante, Love's vision well might fill thy mind
With horror, when his essence thou recall'st;
For when that essence to the world is shown,
Death to the lover never fails to come,
For thee the seven stars the hours marked
With trinal signs, a mystery deep to shew;
Love, and Madonna, and the burning heart,
The mantle, smiles and tears, are mysteries all.

Fully these mystic types I comprehend;

But to reveal their import to the world
Were guilt, a deed of danger and of shame:

And he who knows their meaning well as I,

Seized with that horror which thy heart dismayed,
By silence to thy lines will best respond.

This sonnet is in accordance with the theory of Professor Rossetti, who considers the essence of love in the poems of the Ghibelines of the middle ages to be anti-papalism;

a meaning which, if it had been known to the Inquisition, would inevitably, as the sonnet expresses, have brought down death on the lover. It is probable that the anti-papal sentiments of Dante, the boldness and danger of which astonish us in the Commedia, were divulged to few till after his death; or it may be, that prudential motives induced the Inquisition to overlook them. Even at this day every true Romanist must read them with a portion of the horror expressed in Professor Rossetti's sonnet, from their direct tendency to shake the very foundations of his church.

Guido Cavalcante's interpretation of the dream, Dante informs us, was not the true one; and he adds, that the true solution was afterwards known to every one. Unfortunately, he has not thought proper to record it; and, as that of the only Edipus who has attempted to give it is disputed, we have still to invoke a Magnus Apollo.

The completest discourse on the essence or nature of love, of the immense number that have appeared, is one of eight lectures, delivered by Benedetto Varchi, in the Florentine Academy, 1553. In it he has made the vehicle of his ideas a comment on the following sonnet of Petrarch.

S' amor non è, che dunque è quel ch' io sento?

If love this is not, what then do I feel?

But if 'tis love, who shall its nature tell?
If good, whence its effect so deadly and severe ?
If ill, whence in its torments is such sweet?
If willingly I burn, whence tears and plaints?
If in the will's despite, 'tis vain to grieve!
O living death! O evil full of joy!

If I oppose thee, whence thy mighty power?

If I consent, most wrongfully I mourn.

In a frail bark, 'midst winds so contrary,
I float on the deep sea without a helm;
With sense so light, with error heavy laden,

That to myself my wishes are not known,
Freezing in summer, while I burn in frost.

In this lecture, Varchi notices every beautiful and every extravagant fancy which Petrarch and the poets of the first age have connected with the passion of love; but we do not observe the slightest hint that political sentiments were ever secretly conveyed under that symbol.

Sonnet VIII. of the Vita Nuova is a reply to the question, What is Love? and Dante in the two first lines,

Love and the gentle heart are but one thing;

As says the wise man in his apophthegm;

alludes to and adopts the sentiment of Guido Guinicelli (died, 1276), to whom he pays the great compliment of saying,

He was a father to me, and to those

My betters, who have ever used the sweet
And pleasant rhymes of love.

Purg. xxvi. 92.

Cary has translated some pleasing specimens of his poetry, and given them in a note (Purg. xi. 97). We shall add the Canzone to which Son. VIII., V. N., refers, as being interesting in itself, and in order to bring it in contrast with another, on the same subject, by Guido Cavalcante, to whose poetical talents Dante gives a preference in the following passage of the Commedia :

Cimabue thought

To lord it over painting's field; and now
The cry is Giotto's, and his name eclipsed.
Thus hath one Guido from the other snatched
The letter'd prize.

Purg. xi. 94.

CANZONE OF GUIDO GUINICELLI.

Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore.

Love finds a refuge in the gentle heart,
As bird his safety in the verdant bough.
Before the gentle heart Love was not made;
Nor Nature made the gentle heart ere Love.
Soon as the Sun came forth,

So soon the splendour of its brightness shone;
Nor was before the Sun.

And Love assumes his place in gentleness
By a peculiar right,

As heat takes place in brightness of the fire.
The fire of Love in gentle heart is caught,
As is the virtue in the precious stone;
For from the star its worth doth not descend
Till by the Sun 'tis made a gentle thing:

When everything that's vile

The Sun from it hath by its power drawn forth,

The star then gives it worth;

Just so the heart by Nature fashioned pure,

Sincere, and generous,

A gentle lady, like the Star, enamours.

Love by his nature rests in gentle heart,

As on the taper's summit rests the flame :