Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

Michael Angelo, surveying the fate and the genius of Dante, exclaims :

་་

Pur fuss' io tal

Per l'aspro esilio suo con sua virtute,
Darei del mundo il più felice stato.

Why have I not been such as he!.... For his bitter exile, with his virtue, I would give all the enjoyments of the world."

Tasso celebrated Camoens when the author of the Lusiad was yet almost unknown, and proclaimed his renown before his name was re-echoed by Fame, with her hundred tongues.

Vasco

*

*

*

buon Luigi

Tant 'oltre stende il glorioso volo,

Che i tuoi spalmati legni andar men lunge.
Vasco....Camoens has taken such a glorious flight, that

thy tarred ships have not been so far."

Can any thing be more beautiful than this association of illustrious equals, revealing themselves one to another as it were by signs, exchanging salutations, and conversing together in a language intelligible to themselves alone?

But what could Milton have thought of the prediction of good fortune to the Stuarts in the terrible drama of the Prince of Denmark? The apologist of the condemnation of Charles I. was

well enabled to prove how greatly his Shakspeare was mistaken. He might have applied to England the words of Hamlet: Or ere the shoes were old, with which she followed the poor king's body. The prophecy has been retrenched. The Stuarts have been banished from Hamlet, as they have disappeared from the world.

MY FORMER MISJUDGMENT OF SHAKSPEARE-MISTAKEN

ADMIRERS OF THE POET.

I FORMERLY measured Shakspeare with the classic microscope. It is an excellent instrument for observing the ornaments of good or bad taste, the perfect or imperfect details; but it is unfit for the observation of the whole, as the focus of the lens bears only on a single point, and is incapable of embracing the entire surface. Dante, now one of the objects of my highest admiration, appeared to me in the same diminished perspective. I wished to find an epopee according to rules, in a free epic poem, including the history of the ideas, the knowledge, the faith, the men, and the events of a whole epoch; a monument similar to those cathedrals which bear the impress of the genius of past ages, and in which the elegance and truth of the details, equal the grandeur and majesty of the whole.

The classic school, which did not blend the lives of authors with their works, deprived itself of a powerful medium of appreciation. The banishment of Dante furnishes a key to his genius when we follow the exile into the cloisters, where he sought peace; when we are present at the composition of his poems on the highways and in the various places to which he wandered; when we hear his last sigh breathed on a foreign land, do we not read with deeper interest the melancholy stanzas of the three destinies of man after death?

Let it be supposed that Homer never existed; that we read the lays of all Greece, instead of those of one of her sons; I can pardon the learned for this poetic heresy. Yet I should be very unwilling to lose any portion of the adventures of Homer. Yes; the poet must necessarily have played in his cradle with nine turtle-doves; his infantine prattle must have resembled the warbling of nine species of birds. Do you deny these incontestable facts? What then can you make of the cestus of Venus? What signify anachronisms? I hold that the life of the father of fable was related by Herodotus the father of history. Why should I go to Chios and Smyrna, were it not to salute the school and the river of Melesigenes,

« ZurückWeiter »