Yes, I shall die:  what wilt thou gain? 
  The cross before my bier will go;
  And thou wilt hear the bells complain,
  The Misereres loud and low. 
  Midmost the church thou’lt see me lie
  With folded hands and frozen eye;
  Then say at last, I do repent!—­
  Nought else remains when fires are spent.

Here is a rustic Oenone (p. 307):—­

  Fell death, that fliest fraught with woe! 
  Thy gloomy snares the world ensphere: 
  Where no man calls, thou lov’st to go;
  But when we call, thou wilt not hear. 
  Fell death, false death of treachery,
  Thou makest all content but me.

Another is less reproachful, but scarcely less sad (p. 308):—­

  Strew me with blossoms when I die,
  Nor lay me ’neath the earth below;
  Beyond those walls, there let me lie,
  Where oftentimes we used to go. 
  There lay me to the wind and rain;
  Dying for you, I feel no pain: 
  There lay me to the sun above;
  Dying for you, I die of love.

Yet another of these pitiful love-wailings displays much poetry of expression (p. 271):—­

  I dug the sea, and delved the barren sand: 
  I wrote with dust and gave it to the wind: 
  Of melting snow, false Love, was made thy band,
  Which suddenly the day’s bright beams unbind. 
  Now am I ware, and know my own mistake—­
  How false are all the promises you make;
  Now am I ware, and know the fact, ah me! 
  That who confides in you, deceived will be.

It would scarcely be well to pause upon these very doleful ditties.  Take, then, the following little serenade, in which the lover on his way to visit his mistress has unconsciously fallen on the same thought as Bion (p. 85):—­

     Yestreen I went my love to greet,
     By yonder village path below: 
     Night in a coppice found my feet;
     I called the moon her light to show—­
  O moon, who needs no flame to fire thy face,
  Look forth and lend me light a little space!

Enough has been quoted to illustrate the character of the Tuscan popular poetry.  These village rispetti bear the same relation to the canzoniere of Petrarch as the ‘savage drupe’ to the ‘suave plum.’  They are, as it were, the wild stock of that highly artificial flower of art.  Herein lies, perhaps, their chief importance.  As in our ballad literature we may discern the stuff of the Elizabethan drama undeveloped, so in the Tuscan people’s songs we can trace the crude form of that poetic instinct which produced the sonnets to Laura.  It is also very probable that some such rustic minstrelsy preceded the Idylls of Theocritus and the Bucolics of Virgil; for coincidences of thought and imagery, which can scarcely be referred to any conscious study of the ancients, are not a few.  Popular poetry has this great value for the student of literature:  it enables him to trace those forms of fancy and of feeling which are native to the people, and which must ultimately determine the character of national art, however much that may be modified by culture.