enough in "Avenge, Lord!" to burn up the whole of Chiabrera's canzoniere.
Chiabrera was happier, and perhaps rendered as great a service to Italian poetry, in his lighter scherzi and Canzonette. canzonette. Stimulated by the new developments in music, and taking Ronsard for his model, he found a midway "tra la via grece e'l bel cammin francese." He released the Italian lyric from its somewhat slavish bondage to the hendecasyllable and the septenar, experimenting in shorter lines and sonorous masculine rhymes. Tripping trochaic cadences like the following were comparatively new in Italian verse:—
Belle rose porporine
Che tra spine
Sull' aurora non aprite:
Ma, ministri degli amori
Bei tesori
Di bei denti custodite;
Dite, rose prezïose
Amorose;
Dite, ond' è che s' io m' affiso
Nel bel guardo vivo ardente,
Voi repente
Discioglete un bel sorriso?
Unusual also, though they had been used by Dante, are the rhymes in the second, fourth, and sixth lines of each verse in the following:—
"O man leggiadra, o bella man di rose;
Rose non di giardin,
Che un oltraggio di sole a mezzo giorno
Vinte conduce a fin;
Ma rose che l' Aurora in suo ritorno
Semina sul mattin.
