"_A curious preference for the artificial should be mentioned as
characteristic of ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI'S poetry. For his century was
anything but artless; the great commonplaces that form the main stock
of human thought were no longer in their first flush, and he addressed
a people no longer childish. . . . Unquestionably his fancies were
fantastic, anti-natural, bordering on hallucination, and they betray a
desire for impossible novelty; but it is allowable to prefer them to
the sickly simplicity of those so-called poems that embroider with old
faded wools upon the canvas of worn-out truisms, trite, trivial and
idiotically sentimental patterns._"
Let me have dames and damsels richly clad
To feed and tend my mirth,
Singing by day and night to make me glad;
Let me have fruitful gardens of great girth
Fill'd with the strife of birds,
With water-springs, and beasts that house i' the earth.
Let me seem Solomon for lore of words,
Samson for strength, for beauty Absalom.
Knights as my serfs be given;
And as I will, let music go and come;
Till, when I will, I will to enter Heaven.
ALESSANDRO DE MEDICI.--_Madrigal, from D. G. Rossetti's version_.