Ab joi et ab joven m’apais E jois e jovens m’apaia; Qar mos amics es lo plus gais Per q’ieu sui coindet’ e gaia. E pois ieu li sui veraia Bes tanh q’el me sia verais. Qanc de lui amar nom estrais Ni ai en cor quem n’estraia. ‘With joy and youth I am content; may joy and youth give me contentment! For my friend is most joyous, therefore I am amiable and gay. And as I am true to him, true he must be to me. For I do not withhold my love from him, so neither can I think that he should withhold his from me.’ Unfortunately the serene sky of this happiness was soon to be overclouded. We can distinctly recognise the mutual position of the lovers. Count Rambaut, if he had at any time felt a serious passion for Beatrice, soon got over that weakness. In vain he tries to hide his apathy from the keen glance of the loving woman. She is appeased for the moment by his grandiloquent vows of eternal devotion; but soon her suspicion awakes again with renewed strength. Such are the feelings which have inspired the admirable _tenso_ respectively ascribed to Rambaut and Beatrice, but most likely composed by both of them in alternate stanzas of reproach and excuse. The poet, taxed with indifference and fickleness, explains that the rareness of his visits is caused by his fear of the evil tongues and spies ‘who have taken my sense and breath away.’ But the lady is little impressed with this tender care for her reputation. ‘No thanks do I owe you,’ she says, ‘for refusing to see me when I send for you, because of the harm I might suffer through it. And if you take greater care of my welfare than I do myself, you must forsooth be over-loyal; more so than the Knights of the Hospital.’ Only by the most extravagant promises of amendment is the poet able to gain from the lady the qualified concession: ‘Friend, I will trust you so far, so that I find you true and loyal to me at all times.’ A second song of the countess marks a further stage of this unfortunate amour. The poet now has dropped the mask; the lady is deserted—deserted for another love. The sight of her misery is pathetic, although, perhaps, less dignified than would be the silent pride of a noble-hearted woman. But pride is strange to the heart of poor Beatrice. Her desire is not to upbraid, but, if possible, to regain, her truant lover; and nothing she considers beneath her dignity that may accomplish this sole desire of her heart. Abject flattery of her lover and even the praise of her own beauty are resorted to by her with a naïve openness which, somehow, makes us forget her utter want of dignity. There is about her poem the true ring of simple pathos, which I have tried to retain as far as possible in the subjoined rendering of three of the stanzas: CANZO.