Italian Literature taken from The Edinburgh Magazine and Literary Miscellany October 1820 to June 1821/Patriotic Effusions of the Italian Poets—Introduction
The Edinburgh Magazine, June 1821, pages 512-515
PATRIOTIC EFFUSIONS OF THE ITALIAN POETS.
Whoever has attentively studied the works of the Italian Poets, from the days of Dante and Petrarch, to those of Foscolo and Pindemonte, must have been struck with those allusions to the glory and the fall, the renown and the degradation of Italy, which give a melancholy interest to their pages. Amidst all the vicissitudes of that devoted country, the warning voice of her bards has still been heard to prophesy the impending storm, and to call up such deep and spirit-stirring recollections from the glorious past, as have resounded through the land, notwithstanding the loudest tumults of those discords which have made her
Long, long a bloody stage,
For petty kinglings tame,
Their miserable game
Of puny war to wage.
There is something very affecting in these vain, though exalted aspirations after that independence, which the Italians, as a nation, seem destined never to regain. The strains in which their high-toned feelings on this subject are recorded, produce on our minds the same effect with the song of the imprisoned bird, whose melody is fraught, in our imagination, with recollections of the green woodland, the free air, and unbounded sky. We soon grow weary of the perpetual violets and zephyrs, whose cloying sweetness pervades the sonnets and canzoni of the minor Italian Poets, till we are ready to "die in aromatic pain;" nor is our interest much more excited, even by the everlasting laurel which inspires the enamoured Petrarch with so ingenious a variety of concetti, as might reasonably cause it to be doubted whether the beautiful Laura, or the emblematic Tree, were the real object of the bard's affection; but the moment a patriotic chord is struck, our feelings are awakened, and we find it easy to sympathize with the emotions of a modern Roman, surrounded by the ruins of the Capitol; a Venetian, when contemplating the proud trophies won by his ancestors at Byzantium, or a Florentine amongst the tombs of the mighty dead, in the church of Santa Croce. It is not, perhaps, now, the time to plead, with any effect, the cause of Italy; yet cannot we consider that nation as altogether degraded, whose literature, from the dawn of its majestic immortality, has been consecrated to the nurture of every generous principle and ennobling recollection; and whose "choice and master-spirits," under the most adverse circumstances, have kept alive a flame, which may well be considered as imperishable, since the "ten thousand tyrants" of the land have failed to quench its brightness. We present our readers with a few of the minor effusions in which the indignant, though unavailing regrets of those, who, to use the words of Alfieri, are "Slaves, yet still indignant slaves,"* [1]have been feelingly pourtrayed. The first of these productions must, in the original, be familiar to every reader who has any acquaintance with Italian literature.
- ↑ * Schiavi siam, ma schiavi ognor frementi.—Alfieri.