he love of yore,
Its white ghost haunts the moon-white ways;
But when it meets me face to face,
Flies trembling to the grave once more.

GREEN LEAVES AND SERE

Three tall poplars beside the pool
Shiver and moan in the gusty blast;
The carded clouds are blown like wool,
And the yellowing leaves fly thick and fast.

The leaves, now driven before the blast,
Now flung by fits on the curdling pool,
Are tossed heaven-high and dropped at last
As if at the whim of a jabbering fool.

O leaves, once rustling green and cool!
Two met here where one moans aghast
With wild heart heaving towards the past:
Three tall poplars beside the pool.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO

(1313-1375)

BY W. J. STILLMAN

It has been justly observed, and confirmed by all that we know of the
early history of literature, that the first forms of it were in verse.
This is in accordance with a principle which is stated by Herbert
Spencer on a different but related theme, that "Ornament was before
dress," the artistic instincts underlying and preceding the utilitarian
preoccupations. History indeed was first poetry, as we had Homer before
Thucydides, and as in all countries the traditions of the past take the
form of metrical, and generally musical, recitation. An excellent and
polished school of prose writers is the product of a tendency in
national life of later origin than that which calls out the bards and
ballad-singers, and is proof of a more advanced culture. The Renaissance
in Italy was but the resumption of a life long suspended, and the
succession of the phenomena in which was therefore far more rapid than
was possible in a nation which had to trace the path without any
survivals of a prior awakening; and while centuries necessarily
intervened between Homer and the "Father of History," a generation
sufficed between Dante and Boccaccio, for Italian literature had only to
throw off the leaden garb of Latin form to find its new dress in the
vernacular. Dante certainly wrote Italian prose, but he was more at ease
in verse; and while the latter provoked in him an abundance of those
happy phrases which seem to have been born with the thought they
express, and which pass into the familiar stock of imagery of all later
time, the prose of the 'Convito' and the 'Vita Nuova' hardly ever
recalls itself in common speech by any parallel of felicity.

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