as it were, in solution all the images and thoughts of antiquity, all the riches of his native literature.  In that vast reservoir of poems and mythologies and phrases, so patiently accumulated, so tenaciously preserved, so thoroughly assimilated, he plunged the trivial subject he had chosen, and triumphantly presented to the world the spolia opima of scholarship and taste.  What mattered it that the theme was slight?  The art was perfect, the result splendid.  One canto of 125 stanzas describes the youth of Giuliano, who sought to pass his life among the woods, a hunter dead to love, but who was doomed to be ensnared by Cupid.  The chase, the beauty of Simonetta, the palace of Venus, these are the three subjects of a book as long as the first Iliad.  The second canto begins with dreams and prophecies of glory to be won by Giuliano in the tournament.  But it stops abruptly.  The tragic catastrophe of the Pazzi Conjuration cut short Poliziano’s panegyric by the murder of his hero.  Meanwhile the poet had achieved his purpose.  His torso presented to Italy a model of style, a piece of written art adequate to the great painting of the Renaissance period, a double star of poetry which blent the splendours of the ancient and the modern world.  To render into worthy English the harmonies of Poliziano is a difficult task.  Yet this must be attempted if an English reader is to gain any notion of the scope and substance of the Italian poet’s art.  In the first part of the poem we are placed, as it were, at the mid point between the ‘Hippolytus’ of Euripides and Shakspere’s ‘Venus and Adonis.’  The cold hunter Giuliano is to see Simonetta, and seeing, is to love her.  This is how he first discovers the triumphant beauty:[33]

  White is the maid, and white the robe around her,
    With buds and roses and thin grasses pied;
  Enwreathed folds of golden tresses crowned her,
  Shadowing her forehead fair with modest pride: 

  The wild wood smiled; the thicket where he found her,
    To ease his anguish, bloomed on every side: 
  Serene she sits, with gesture queenly mild,
  And with her brow tempers the tempests wild.

After three stanzas of this sort, in which the poet’s style is more apparent than the object he describes, occurs this charming picture:—­

  Reclined he found her on the swarded grass
    In jocund mood; and garlands she had made
  Of every flower that in the meadow was,
    Or on her robe of many hues displayed;
  But when she saw the youth before her pass,
    Raising her timid head awhile she stayed;
  Then with her white hand gathered up her dress,
    And stood, lap-full of flowers, in loveliness.

  Then through the dewy field with footstep slow
    The lingering maid began to take her way,
  Leaving her lover in great fear and woe,
    For now he longs for nought but her alway: 
  The wretch, who cannot bear that she should go,
    Strives with a whispered prayer her feet to stay;
  And thus at last, all trembling, all afire,
  In humble wise he breathes his soul’s desire: