di te fammi assaggiare." Then the joys of
love, depicted with equal liveliness, amplifications as usual of the
erotic hyperboles of the Shulamite and her lover; the phenomenon, to
whose uncouth strangeness devotional poetry accustoms us even now-a-days,
which we remarked in Gottfried von Strasburg and Frauenlob, and on which
it is needless further to insist.

But there is here in Jacopone something which we missed in Gottfried
and Frauenlob, of which there is no trace in the Song of Solomon, but
which, suggested in the lovely six lines of Bruder Wernher, makes the
emotionalism of the Italian Middle Ages wholesome and fruitful. A
child-like boy and girlish light-heartedness that makes love a matter
not merely of sighing and dying, but of singing and dancing; and,
proceeding thence, a fervour of loving delightedness which is no longer
of the man towards the woman, but of the man and the woman towards the
baby. The pious monk, in his ecstasies over Jesus, intones a song which
might be that of those passionate _farandoles_ of angels who dance and
carol in Botticelli's most rapturous pictures:--

"Amore, amor, dove m'hai tu menato?
Amore, amor, fuor di me m'hai trattato.
Ciascun amante, amator del Signore,
Venga alla danza cantando d'amore."

Can we not see them, the souls of such fervent lovers, swaying and
eddying, with joined hands and flapping wings, flowers dropping from
their hair, above the thatched roof of the stable at Bethlehem?

The stable at Bethlehem! It is perpetually returning to Jacopone's
thoughts. The cell, the dreadful underground prison at Palestrina, is
broken through, irradiated by visions which seem paintings by Lippo or
Ghirlandaio, nay, by Correggio and Titian themselves, "the tender baby
body (_il tenerin corpo_) of the blood of Mary has been given in charge
to a pure company; St. Joseph and the Virgin contemplate the little
creature (_il piccolino_) with stupefaction. _O gran piccolino Jesu
nostro diletto_, he who had seen Thee between the ox and the little
ass, breathing upon thy holy breast, would not have guessed thou were
begotten of the Trinity!" But besides the ox and the ass there are the
angels. "In the worthy stable of the sweet baby the angels are singing
round the little one; they sing and cry out, the beloved angels, quite
reverent, timid and shy (_tutti riverenti, timidi e subbietti_, this
beautiful expression is almost impossible save in Italian), round the
little baby