_River, that from thy Apennine recess, Swollen with surge of tributary snow, Com’st foaming, and thy tawny overflow Hurlest on Samnian vales with headlong stress; Thy farther shore, inhere Love awaits to bless, I seek, and by thy wrath unharmed would go; If thou intendest not my overthrow, With stringent curb thy furious flood repress. But art thou verily resolved to kill, And purposest that this conclusive day Shall jointly terminate my good and ill, Grant me but once to stem thy shock and spray: My happy errand I would fain fulfil; Me going spare, returning sweep away._ The general passion for verse naturally extended to the refined and accomplished ladies of the time. Only two, however, have gained a permanent position in Italian literature, as much by their characters as by their poetry. The muse of VITTORIA COLONNA (1490-1547) chiefly prompted the apotheosis of her husband, the Marquis of Pescara, “a sworded man whose trade was blood,” and who, though a great captain, scarcely possessed a single amiable or magnanimous trait of character. The pathos of the situation surpasses that of the verse which it called forth. As a woman, Vittoria evoked the enthusiastic admiration of her contemporaries, and lives for posterity more in the strains of Michael Angelo than in her own. The unhappy fate of GASPARA STAMPA (1524-53), who literally died of love, would have preserved her name without her verse; she was, nevertheless, a true poetess, and might have been a great one had she not, like so many poetesses, struck upon the fatal rock of fluency. Could her centuries of sonnets be concentrated into a dozen, she would rank high. More truly a poet than any of the stricter Petrarchists is a Neapolitan, LUIGI TRANSILLO, although his advantage is rather intensity of feeling than superiority in the poetic art. He must indeed be admitted to have derogated in some measure from the high standard of taste then generally prevalent, and to have foreshadowed, though but in a very trifling degree, the extravagances of the seventeenth century. This may be forgiven to his southern ardour and liveliness, and foreign critics are not likely to perceive the little technical defects so severely visited upon him by his countrymen. He had the unspeakable advantage over his competitors of being devoted to no ideal nymph, but to a real and very great and very cold lady, the Marchioness del Vasto, wife of the Viceroy of Naples. Such an attachment was necessarily Platonic on his part, and imaginary, if so much, on the lady’s. The first rapture is magnificently expressed in the sonnet in which the poor knight and military retainer, whose business in life was to help in clearing the Mediterranean of Turks, compares his rash love to the flight of Icarus: