Another point of view may be gained by noticing the pre-dominant tone of the two literatures.  Whenever English poetry is really great, it approximates to the tragic and the stately; whereas the Italians are peculiarly felicitous in the smooth and pleasant style, which combines pathos with amusement, and which does not trespass beyond the region of beauty into the domain of sublimity or terror.  Italian poetry is analogous to Italian painting and Italian music:  it bathes the soul in a plenitude of charms, investing even the most solemn subjects with loveliness.  Rembrandt and Albert Duerer depict the tragedies of the Sacred History with a serious and awful reality:  Italian painters, with a few rare but illustrious exceptions, shrink from approaching them from any point of view but that of harmonious melancholy.  Even so the English poets stir the soul to its very depths by their profound and earnest delineations of the stern and bitter truths of the world:  Italian poets environ all things with the golden haze of an artistic harmony; so that the soul is agitated by no pain at strife with the persuasions of pure beauty.

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POPULAR SONGS OF TUSCANY

It is a noticeable fact about the popular songs of Tuscany that they are almost exclusively devoted to love.  The Italians in general have no ballad literature resembling that of our Border or that of Spain.  The tragic histories of their noble families, the great deeds of their national heroes, and the sufferings of their country during centuries of warfare, have left but few traces in their rustic poetry.  It is true that some districts are less utterly barren than others in these records of the past.  The Sicilian people’s poetry, for example, preserves a memory of the famous Vespers; and one or two terrible stories of domestic tragedy, like the tale of Rosmunda in ’La Donna Lombarda,’ the romance of the Baronessa di Carini, and the so-called Caso di Sciacca, may still be heard upon the lips of the people.  But these exceptions are insignificant in comparison with the vast mass of songs which deal with love; and I cannot find that Tuscany, where the language of this minstrelsy is purest, and where the artistic instincts of the race are strongest, has anything at all approaching to our ballads.[21] Though the Tuscan contadini are always singing, it rarely happens that

    The plaintive numbers flow
  For old, unhappy, far-off things,
    And battles long ago.

On the contrary, we may be sure, when we hear their voices ringing through the olive-groves or macchi, that they are chanting

    Some more humble lay,
  Familiar matter of to-day,—­
  Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
  That has been, and may be again;

or else, since their melodies are by no means uniformly sad, some ditty of the joyousness of springtime or the ecstasy of love.