as crossing a real line, over
which knights and lovers had passed. And so they have, both real and
fabulous; the former not less romantic, the latter scarcely less
real. . . . Fair speed your sails over the lucid waters, ye lovers, on a
lover-like sea! Fair speed them, yet never land; for where the poet has
left you, there ought ye, as ye are, to be living forever--forever
gliding about a summer sea, touching at its flowery islands and reposing
beneath its moon."

Hunt's sojourn in Italy, where he lived in close association with Byron
and Shelley, enabled him to _preciser_ his knowledge of the Italian
language and literature. In 1846 he published a volume of "Stories from
the Italian Poets," containing a summary or free paraphrase in prose of
the "Divine Comedy" and the poems of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso,
"with comments throughout, occasional passages versified and critical
notices of the lives and genius of the authors." Like our own
romanticist poet Longfellow, who rediscovered Europe for America, Leigh
Hunt was a sympathetic and interpretative rather than a creative genius;
and like Longfellow, an admirable translator. Among his collected poems
are a number of elegant and spirited versions from various mediaeval
literatures. "The Gentle Armour" is a playful adaptation of a French
fabliau "Les Trois Chevaliers et la Chemise," which tells of a knight
whose hard-hearted lady set him the task of fighting his two rivals in
the lists, armed only in her smock; and, in contrition for this harsh
imposure, went to the altar with her faithful champion, wearing only the
same bloody sark as her bridal garment. At least this is the pretty turn
which Hunt gave to the story. In the original it had a coarser ending.
There are also, among these translations from mediaeval sources, the
Latin drinking song attributed to Walter Map--

Mihi est propositum in taberna mori--

and Andrea de Basso's terrible "Ode to a Dead Body," in fifteenth-century
Italian; which utters, with extraordinary power, the ascetic thought of
the Middle Age, dwelling with a kind of gloomy exultation on the foulness
of the human frame in decay.

In the preface to his "Italian Poets," Hunt speaks of "how widely Dante
has re-attracted of late the attention of the world." He pronounces him
"the greatest poet for intensity that ever lived," and complains that his
metrical translators have failed to render his "passionate, practical,
and creativ