Page images
PDF
EPUB

GENIUS OF ITALY.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Claims of Italy-Prayer of Petrarch-Beauty the principal feature in the Italian Landscape-Its Position and General Aspect-Language and Literature-Characteristics of its Sculpture, Painting, and Music-Harmony between Natural and Moral Beauty-Spirit and Form-Final Reconcilement of all things-Design of this Work.

FEW countries have played a more important part in the affairs of mankind than Italy. Fewer still present, to cultivated minds, more varied points of attraction and study. Once the queen of the world, swaying her sceptre over a population of more than a hundred and twenty millions, and embracing, in her ample grasp, a territory which touched the gray hills of Scotland, and the burning sands of Africa, which extended beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and swept eastward to the Euphrates and the Caspian Sea; for ages the centre of military power and splendor; the scene of boundless ambition and incredible exploits; the home of the Scipios and the Cæsars, of Cato and the Gracchi; the land of Horace and Virgil, of Cicero and the Antonines; the country where Christianity found an early home, and acquired a

dominion wider and more magnificent than that of the Cæsars; in the lapse of time overrun by northern barbarians, yet even then retaining her ancient beauty and pride, conquering her conquerors by the silent might of her knowledge and refinement; shining, like a star, in the night of barbarism which enveloped the neighboring nations; generating freedom in the republics of Genoa, Florence, and Venice, and diffusing far and wide, as from a centre, the influence of science and letters, of freedom and the arts; often drenched in blood and torn by intestine broils, falling into weakness and decay, writhing under the iron hoof of the Gaul, the Spaniard, and the German, divided into petty kingdoms, and oppressed by miserable despots, civil and ecclesiastical; yet ever more remembering the days of old, yearning for independence, and struggling upwards to grasp the fair ideal of liberty and truth; and now, after the degradation of ages, rising before the eyes of the world, in the assertion of her rights, and giving promise of a better and more glorious destiny.

But these are not the only claims which Italy offers to our regard. It is the very home of beauty, the land of poetry and song, the haunt of all fair forms, of all divine melodies. Here Dante, Tasso and Ariosto sang; here Raphael, Titian and Angelo painted, as with hues of heaven; here Machiavelli and Vico speculated, and here "the starry Galileo," from the heights of Fiesolé, gazed into the opening heavens. It is a country in which, through a long series of ages, the human intellect has displayed all the resources of genius and power; whose scholars first revealed to Europe the literary treasures of antiquity; whose jurists expounded those principles which form the basis of jurisprudence in most of the European nations; whose navigators added to the boundaries of the old world the vast regions of the new; whose poets first fired the bosoms of Chaucer and Milton, and lent a strange melody to the native strength and grandeur

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »