came by chance, and are not pursued into detail.  Indeed, they are not done so much for the love of Nature herself, as for passing illustrations of Sordello’s ways of thought and feeling upon matters which are not Nature.  As such, even in a mediaeval poem, they are excusable.  And vivid they are in colour, in light, in reality.  Some I have already isolated.  Here are a few more, just to show his hand.  This is the castle and its scenery, described in Book i.: 

    In Mantua territory half is slough,
    Half pine-tree forest:  maples, scarlet oaks
    Breed o’er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes
    With sand the summer through:  but ’tis morass
    In winter up to Mantua’s walls.  There was,
    Some thirty years before this evening’s coil,
    One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil,
    Goito; just a castle built amid
    A few low mountains; firs and larches hid
    Their main defiles, and rings of vineyard bound
    The rest.  Some captured creature in a pound,
    Whose artless wonder quite precludes distress,
    Secure beside in its own loveliness,
    So peered, with airy head, below, above
    The castle at its toils, the lapwings love
    To glean among at grape time.

And this is the same place from the second book: 

                And thus he wandered, dumb
    Till evening, when he paused, thoroughly spent
    On a blind hill-top:  down the gorge he went,
    Yielding himself up as to an embrace. 
    The moon came out; like features of a face,
    A querulous fraternity of pines,
    Sad blackthorn clumps, leafless and grovelling vines
    Also came out, made gradually up
    The picture; ’twas Goito’s mountain-cup
    And castle.

And here, from Book iii., is Spring when Palma, dreaming of the man she can love, cries that the waking earth is in a thrill to welcome him—­

                “Waits he not the waking year? 
    His almond-blossoms must be honey-ripe
    By this; to welcome him fresh runnels stripe
    The thawed ravines; because of him the wind
    Walks like a herald.”

This is May from Book ii.; and afterwards, in the third book, the months from Spring to Summer—­

                My own month came;
    ’Twas a sunrise of blossoming and May. 
    Beneath a flowering laurel thicket lay
    Sordello; each new sprinkle of white stars
    That smell fainter of wine than Massic jars
    Dug up at Baiae, when the south wind shed
    The ripest, made him happier.

    Not any strollings now at even-close
    Down the field path, Sordello! by thorn-rows
    Alive with lamp-flies, swimming spots of fire
    And dew, outlining the black cypress-spire
    She waits you at, Elys, who heard you first
    Woo her, the snow month through, but, ere she durst
    Answer ’twas April.