"It is an admirable piece of work crowded with keen descriptions of
Nature in the Casentino, and of life in the streets of Florence. And
every piece of description is so filled with the character of the
'Italian person of quality' who describes them--a petulant, humorous,
easily angered, happy, observant, ignorant, poor gentleman--that
Browning entirely disappears. The poem retains for us in its verse, and
indeed in its light rhythm, the childlikeness, the naïveté, the simple
pleasures, the ignorance and the honest boredom with the solitudes of
Nature--of a whole class of Italians, not only of the time when it was
written, but of the present day. It is a delightful, inventive piece of
gay and pictorial humor." (Stopford Brooke, _The Poetry of Browning_, p.
322.)
33. _Corn._ In Great Britain the word is generally applied to wheat,
rye, oats, and barley, not to maize as in America.
34. _Stinking hemp._ In Chapter I of James Lane Allen's _The Reign of
Law_ is the following passage on the odor of the hemp-field: "And now
borne far through the steaming air floats an odor, balsamic, startling:
the odor of those plumes and stalks and blossoms from which is exuding
freely the narcotic resin of the great nettle." When the long swaths of
cut hemp lies across the field, the smell is represented as strongest,
"impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far throughout the
air." To many this odor is essentially unpleasant.
42. _Pulcinello-trumpet._ Pulcinello was originally the clown in the
Neapolitan comedy. Later he became the Punch in Punch and Judy shows.
The trumpet announces that one of these puppet plays is to be given in
the public square.