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, as
it were, in solution all the images and thoughts of antiquity, all the
riches of his native literature. In that vast reservoir of poems and
mythologies and phrases, so patiently accumulated, so tenaciously
preserved, so thoroughly assimilated, he plunged the trivial subject
he had chosen, and triumphantly presented to the world the _spolia
opima_ of scholarship and taste. What mattered it that the theme was
slight? The art was perfect, the result splendid. One canto of 125
stanzas describes the youth of Giuliano, who sought to pass his life
among the woods, a hunter dead to love, but who was doomed to be
ensnared by Cupid. The chase, the beauty of Simonetta, the palace of
Venus, these are the three subjects of a book as long as the first
Iliad. The sec