Near my summer home there is a little cove or landing by the bay, where
nothing larger than a boat can ever anchor. I sit above it now, upon
the steep bank, knee-deep in buttercups, and amid grass so lush and
green that it seems to ripple and flow instead of waving. Below lies a
tiny beach, strewn with a few bits of drift-wood and some purple
shells, and so sheltered by projecting walls that its wavelets plash
but lightly. A little farther out the sea breaks more roughly over
submerged rocks, and the waves lift themselves, before breaking, in an
indescribable way, as if each gave a glimpse through a translucent
window, beyond which all ocean's depths might be clearly seen, could
one but hit the proper angle of vision. On the right side of my retreat
a high wall limits the view, while close upon the left the crumbling
parapet of Fort Greene stands out into the foreground, its verdant
scarp so relieved against the blue water that each inward-bound
schooner seems to sail into a cave of grass. In the middle distance is
a white lighthouse, and beyond lie the round tower of old Fort Louis
and the soft low hills of Conanicut.
Behind me an oriole chirrups in triumph amid the birch-trees which wave
around the house of the haunted window; before me a kingfisher pauses
and waits, and a darting blackbird shows the scarlet on his wings.
Sloops and schooners constantly come and go, careening in the wind,
their white sails taking, if remote enough, a vague blue mantle from
the delicate air. Sail-boats glide in the distance,--each a mere white
wing of canvas,--or coming nearer, and glancing suddenly into the cove,
are put as suddenly on the other tack, and almost in an instant seem
far away. There is to-day such a live sparkle on the water, such a
luminous freshness on the grass, that it seems, as is so often the case
in early June, as if all history were a dream, and the whole earth were
but the creation of a summer's day.
If Petrarch still knows and feels the consummate beauty of these
earthly things, it may seem to him some repayment for the sorrows of a
life-time that one reader, after all this lapse of years, should choose
his sonnets to match this grass, these blossoms, and the soft lapse of
these blue waves. Yet any longer or more continuous poem would be out
of place to-day. I fancy that this narrow cove prescribes the proper
limits of a sonnet; and when I count the lines of ripple within yonder
projecting wall, there proves to be room for just fourteen. Nature
meets our whims with such little fitnesses. The words which build these
delicate structures of Petrarch's are as soft and fine and
close-textured as the sands upon this tiny beach, and their monotone,
if such it be, is the monotone of the neighboring ocean. Is it not
possible, by bringing such a book into the open air, to separate it
from the grimness of commentators, and bring it back to life and light
and Italy?
The beautiful earth is the same as when this poetry and passion were
new; there is the same sunlight, the same blue water and green grass;
yonder pleasure-boat might bear, for aught we know, the friends and
lovers of five centuries ago; Petrarch and Laura might be there, with
Boccaccio and Fiammetta as comrades, and with Chaucer as their stranger
guest. It bears, at any rate, if I know its voyagers, eyes as lustrous,
voices as sweet. With the world thus young, beauty eternal, fancy free,
why should these delicious Italian pages exist but to be tortured into
grammatical examples? Is there no reward to be imagined for a
delightful book that can match Browning's fantastic burial of a tedious
one? When it has sufficiently basked in sunshine, and been cooled in
pure salt air, when it has bathed in heaped clover, and been scented,
page by page, with melilot, cannot its beauty once more blossom, and
its buried loves revive?
Emboldened by such influences, at least let me translate a sonnet, and
see if anything is left after the sweet Italian syllables are gone.
Before this continent was discovered, before English literature
existed, when Chaucer was a child, these words were written. Yet they
are to-day as fresh and perfect as these laburnum-blossoms that droop
above my head. And as the variable and uncertain air comes freighted
with clover-scent from yonder field, so floats through these long
centuries a breath of fragrance, the memory of Laura.