Appress’ un fiume chiaro.

  Hard by a crystal stream
    Girls and maids were dancing round
    A lilac with fair blossoms crowned. 
  Mid these I spied out one
    So tender-sweet, so love-laden,
    She stole my heart with singing then: 
  Love in her face so lovely-kind
  And eyes and hands my soul did bind.

  Di riva in riva.

  From lawn to lea Love led me down the valley,
    Seeking my hawk, where ’neath a pleasant hill
    I spied fair maidens bathing in a rill. 
  Lina was there all loveliness excelling;
    The pleasure of her beauty made me sad,
    And yet at sight of her my soul was glad. 
  Downward I cast mine eyes with modest seeming,
    And all a tremble from the fountain fled: 
    For each was naked as her maidenhead. 
  Thence singing fared I through a flowery plain,
  Where bye and bye I found my hawk again!

  Nel chiaro fiume.

  Down a fair streamlet crystal-clear and pleasant
    I went a fishing all alone one day,
    And spied three maidens bathing there at play. 
  Of love they told each other honeyed stories,
    While with white hands they smote the stream, to wet
    Their sunbright hair in the pure rivulet. 
  Gazing I crouched among thick flowering leafage,
    Till one who spied a rustling branch on high,
    Turned to her comrades with a sudden cry,
  And ‘Go!  Nay, prithee go!’ she called to me: 
    ‘To stay were surely but scant courtesy.’

  Quel sole che nutrica.

  The sun which makes a lily bloom,
    Leans down at times on her to gaze—­
    Fairer, he deems, than his fair rays: 
  Then, having looked a little while,
    He turns and tells the saints in bliss
    How marvellous her beauty is. 
  Thus up in heaven with flute and string
  Thy loveliness the angels sing.

  Di novo e giunt’.

  Lo:  here hath come an errant knight
    On a barbed charger clothed in mail: 
  His archers scatter iron hail. 
  At brow and breast his mace he aims;
    Who therefore hath not arms of proof,
    Let him live locked by door and roof;
  Until Dame Summer on a day
  That grisly knight return to slay.

Poliziano’s treatment of the octave stanza for Rispetti was comparatively popular.  But in his poem of ‘La Giostra,’ written to commemorate the victory of Giuliano de’ Medici in a tournament and to celebrate his mistress, he gave a new and richer form to the metre which Boccaccio had already used for epic verse.  The slight and uninteresting framework of this poem, which opened a new sphere for Italian literature, and prepared the way for Ariosto’s golden cantos, might be compared to one of those wire baskets which children steep in alum water, and incrust with crystals, sparkling, artificial, beautiful with colours not their own.  The mind of Poliziano held,