chiefly Italian.  Leigh Hunt repeats the tale of Francesca da Rimini.  Keats versifies Boccaccio’s ‘Isabella.’  Passing to contemporary poets, Rossetti has acclimatised in English the metres and the manner of the earliest Italian lyrists.  Swinburne dedicates his noblest song to the spirit of liberty in Italy.  Even George Eliot and Tennyson have each of them turned stories of Boccaccio into verse.  The best of Mrs. Browning’s poems, ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ and ‘Aurora Leigh,’ are steeped in Italian thought and Italian imagery.  Browning’s longest poem is a tale of Italian crime; his finest studies in the ‘Men and Women’ are portraits of Italian character of the Renaissance period.  But there is more than any mere enumeration of poets and their work can set forth, in the connection between Italy and England.  That connection, so far as the poetical imagination is concerned, is vital.  As poets in the truest sense of the word, we English live and breathe through sympathy with the Italians.  The magnetic touch which is required to inflame the imagination of the North, is derived from Italy.  The nightingales of English song who make our oak and beech copses resonant in spring with purest melody, are migratory birds, who have charged their souls in the South with the spirit of beauty, and who return to warble native wood-notes in a tongue which is their own.

What has hitherto been said about the debt of the English poets to Italy, may seem to imply that our literature can be regarded as to some extent a parasite on that of the Italians.  Against such a conclusion no protest too energetic could be uttered.  What we have derived directly from the Italian poets are, first, some metres—­especially the sonnet and the octave stanza, though the latter has never taken firm root in England.  ‘Terza rima,’ attempted by Shelley, Byron, Morris, and Mrs. Browning, has not yet become acclimatised.  Blank verse, although originally remodelled by Surrey upon the versi sciolti of the Italians, has departed widely from Italian precedent, first by its decasyllabic structure, whereas Italian verse consists of hendecasyllables; and, secondly, by its greater force, plasticity, and freedom.  The Spenserian stanza, again, is a new and original metre peculiar to our literature; though it is possible that but for the complex structures of Italian lyric verse, it might not have been fashioned for the ‘Faery Queen.’  Lastly, the so-called heroic couplet is native to England; at any rate, it is in no way related to Italian metre.  Therefore the only true Italian exotic adopted without modification into our literature is the sonnet.