was so very, very productive, that a benefactor, moved to pity at the hard work of the begging friar, bestowed upon the convent the charity of an ass, which might help him to carry in all that wondrous plenty; and the oil they made was in so great a quantity, that every poor body had as large a supply as heart might wish ; for, remember, we monks are like the sea, receiving water on every side, only to distribute it bountifully to every stream. Manzoni's Capuchins can, indeed, hold a different language. Famine, pestilence, have always been the battle-field of these mean and ignorant, but brave and devoted, brethren. True friends of humanity in the hour of need (to give the devil his due), they made up for an age of gross indulgence in times of prosperity, by a generous sacrifice of their comfort and safety at the first appearance of great public calamities. When the blind instinct of self-preservation broke the most sacred ties of domestic tenderness asunder, they, the proverbially unfeeling and self-engrossed, stepped invariably forward in all the sublimity of their mission. Manzoni's Capuchins, during the Milan pestilence, are objects of the deepest interest. Fra Cristoforo, who dies there a victim to his zeal, is in his very element. His exhortations to Renzo, as he points with his finger to Don Rodrigo's death-bed, belong to the genuine spirit of Christianity, and the youth's anger and resentment are readily quenched in his bosom, in presence of the awful dealings of eternal justice. Throughout the description of that terrible disaster, Manzoni's genius is lifted to its highest fight. From the days of Thucydides, to Boccaccio, Botta, and De Foe, the world had seen powerful pictures of the plague; Manzoni outdid them all. The gushing feeling of humanity and religion, uppermost in his heart, imparts to the whole description a touching, ineffable tenderness, far more impressive than the most elaborate accumulation of horror and woe. Hear Father Felice's sermon in the Lazaret of Milan : “ Let us turn one thought upon the thousands and thousands who have gone out that way,” pointing to the cemetery ; “let us look around upon the thousands remaining, too much at a loss to know which way they shall go; and again, look upon ourselves, the very with life. Blessed be the name of the Lord !--blessed in his justice ; blessed in his mercy; blessed in death ; blessed in salvation; blessed in this choice he was pleased to make of us! Oh! why was such his pleasure, my children, but to preserve around him a little flock, chastened by affliction, warmed by gratitude; but to impress us more strongly with the conviction that life is His gift; that we may value it as such ; that we may employ it in works worthy of Him ; that the remembrance of our sufferings may teach us pity for the sufferings of others ? Meanwhile let these, whose evils, whose fears and hopes we have shared, amongst whom we leave friends, relatives—brethren, at any rate, for all are brethren-let these, as they see us pass between them, as the rare instances of our convalescence inspire them with some confidence for themselves ; let them be no less relieved than edified by the meekness and holiness of our demeanour. Heaven forbid that they should read on our countenance a clamorous, a carnal joy for having escaped that death they are still so cruelly combatting against. Let them see that our thanksgiving for ourselves is still a prayer for them : let them feel that few that escape up even without these doors we shall remember them, call down God's mercy upon them. From this very walk, from our first steps into restored existence, let ours be a life of love. Let those whose strength is revived, tender a brotherly arm to the weak: let the young bear the old. You childless parents see how many fatherless children are about you—be like fathers unto them! The charity that is to cover your sins, will soothe your sorrows at the same time.” It would be gratuitous, on our part, to add more quotations from “ The Betrothed, a work (to say nothing of its numerous, though all unsatisfactory translations) so familiar to the youngest beginner in Italian scholarship; of which several editions, in the original, have been published in London itself. Manzoni's tragedies are less popular in this country, as, indeed, every where out of Italy. The fine lyrical feeling that runs throughout them admits of no foreign imitation. We have, nevertheless, made some attempt at a metrical version of the famous mountain journey of Martino, Charlemagne's guide across the Alps, and of the first chorus in the third act of “Adelchi,” which have been published elsewhere.* We here subjoin a literal translation of the other chorus in the same tragedy. Ermengarda, daughter of Desiderio, sister of Adelchi, the last Kings of the Lombards, sent back to her father's home after the heartless repudiation of her royal husband, Charles of France, dies broken-hearted, just as the Lombard' throne is tottering to its foundation; she is expiring at Brescia, in the arms of her sister, in the monastery of St. Salvator, where she had taken up her last shelter. A chorus of nuns are made, rather vaguely, to give expression to the poet's own thoughts. “ With her soft fair tresses loose on her panting breast, with slackened hands, and her white countenance overspread with the dew of death, there the pious one reclines, her swimming gaze seeking for Heaven's light. “The lamentation stops short: a unanimous prayer soars heavenwards -a gentle hand lighting on that marble brow, stretches the last curtain upon the blue lustreless eyes. “ Banish, O gentle being, all earthly passions from thy anxious mind : lift up thy thought, as an offering to the Eternal Father, and die- beyond this life only is the end of thy long martyrdom. “ Such was the immovable fate of the sad sufferer. Ever to long for oblivion, ever to long in vain ; and ascend to the God of the Holy, hallowed by her trial of sorrow. “ Alas ! in sleepless darkness, along the lonely cloisters, amidst the virgin melodies, at the foot of the sacred altar, ever did the un-recalled days again spring up in her thought; “ The day, when still beloved, unconscious of the treacherous time to come, she breathed entranced the vivid air of the French shores, and stepped forward, an envied bride, among the Salic maidens. “When from a hill, high in the air, her fair tresses sparkling with gems, she beheld the busy chase swarming on the plain, and the longhaired monarch bowing to his horse's main. “And close on his steps, the throng of reeking coursers and the rushing and the wheeling of the panting hounds, and the bristling wild-boar goaded out of the beaten thickets. .“ Oltremonti ed oltremari.” London: Rolandi, 1844. “ But when, struck by the royal dart, the huge monster was seen streaking with blood the trampled dust, the tender bride, pale with lovely terror, hid her face in the throng of her damsels. “Oh! the wandering Meuse ! Oh, the warm springs of Aix! Where the sovereign warrior laid down his glittering mail, and alighted to refresh his brow, heated by the wild sport of the field ! “ Soft as the dew on the bush of withered flowers, infuses new life into the burning stems, so that they rise in the mild hour of dawn, once more clad in their native verdure, “ Even so the refreshing sound of friendly exhortation, sinks gently into that tumult of thoughts, which the cruel storm-blast of passion aroused, and diverts the heart to the calm bliss of a purer love. “ But even as the sun as it rises on its fiery path, pours down all the incessant influence of his overpowering beams, and once more burns down to the ground those slender stems, “With equal swiftness, from that faint oblivion, the half-lulled passion again rises, unquenchable, and storms the affrighted reason, and calls back the wandering images to their wonted sorrow. “ Banish, O thou gentle being, all earthly desires from thy weary mind. Lift up thy thought, as an offering to the God of mercy, and die. Beneath this ground, in this land which is to afford rest to thy tender spoil, “ Other unhappy ones are slumbering in death ; brides 'reft by the sword, virgins in vain betrothed, mothers whose sons mortally wounded, were discoloured by the last pang, in their embrace; “ Thou, born of the guilty oppressor's race, whose bravery was in their numbers, whose right was outrage and bloodshed, whose vaunt was ruthless ferocity, “ Thou wert by a provident fate ranked among the oppressed: die then, lamented, and calmly descend to rest by their side. Upon thy guiltless remains no harsh word shall be spoken. Die, and let thy bloodless countenance settle in peace, let thy look be as it was, when, unconscious of a deceitful future, it expressed none but the purest maidenly thoughts. “Thus does the setting sun tear himself from the sundered clouds, and, behind the hill , tinges with his evening purple the warm western horizon, an omen to the pious husbandmen of a brighter day.”. Yet the noblest thoughts of this gentlest of Italian bards will be found in the poesy of his youth. In those Inni Sacri, which first clear evidence of his rising genius in Italy. It was certainly remarkable that such a style of poetry should be cultivated at that period. It was not long since Napoleon, at a loss for some new farce to entertain the populace of the faubourgs with, had ventured on the very doubtful policy, of reproducing the Mass on the High Altar of Notre Dame of Paris, when one of his generals assured him, that la pièce serait sifflée ; the Concordat with the new Pope had hardly been signed, and the Catholic church was not yet wholly recalled into being, when a young believer in Cisalpine Milan, was turning all his energies upon the illustration of its chief solemnities. The ascetic Odes on “ Christmas, “Good Friday,” “ Easterday," ," “ Whitsuntide," and the “ Name of Mary,” are not, indeed, church hymns ; they could hardly be set to music. Nothing could be more at variance with the simple and tender English melodies in which Watts gave and Doddridge distinguished themselves, than the lofty strains of prophetic language that Manzoni chose to publish under the same name. These poems are strictly Catholic in their bearing, yet they contain hardly any thing the most consistent Protestant could honestly and reasonably object to. The effect they have upon the reader is analogous to the magic sensation wrought upon us by a stately peal of a deep organ in a vast Gothic minster. It acts on the nerves even more than the mind. The charm resides in the loftiness of measure and rhyme, in the happy ap. plication of the familiar, yet ever-amazing scriptural language, in the warmth of true love that glows throughout every line. It speaks to our senses, as if the words conveyed no meaning, but acted magnetically. It will affect the sceptic hardly less than the warmest believer, as it appeals to the instinct of God, which no speciousness of cold reasoning cap root out of man's heart. Unfortunately, language, as in all lyrical effusions, is here so decidedly the essence of the thought itself, that we hardly know how our tame reproduction of Manzoni's images into English prose will bear us out in our exalted opinion of his performance. We will not, however, hesitate to submit to our readers a version of the “ Pentecoste; or Descent of the Holy Ghost ;" for we are confident that these hymns are either not read, or but imperfectly understood in this country, and our humble efforts may, perhaps, serve to call upon them the attention of persons more fit to do them justice. « WHITSUNTIDE. “ Mother of the saints, thou image on earth of the Heavenly Jerusalem, thou eternal keeper of the incorruptible blood, thou for so many centuries, suffering, fighting, praying : who unfoldest thy tents from sea to sea ; “ Thou camp of all who live in hope, church of the living God, where wert thou ? What corner of the earth sheltered thee, when thy king, dragged to die on the hill, purpled the sods from his sublime altar, “And when the divine Spoil, issuing from darkness, uttered the powerful breath of its second life; and when bearing in his hand the price of redemption, he soared from this earthly dust up to the father's throne, “ Thou, the sharer of his death-groan, conscious of his mysteries, Immortal daughter of his victory, where wert thou ? Only alive to thy danger, only safe in thy obscurity, thou soughtest the refuge of the humblest abode- until that sacred day; “When the regenerating spirit descended upon thee, when it lit in thy hand the unquenchable torch, placed thee on the hill-top as a beacon to the nations, and broke open the food of the word from thy lips, "Even as the rapid light showers down from object to object, and elicits the various colours wherever it rests, so did the manifold voice of the spirit resound: the Arab, the Parthian, the Syrian, each heard it in his own tongue. “ Wherefore doth the slave sigh as she kisses her babes, and gaze with envy at the breast that suckles the free-born ? She knows then not that the Lord raises the humblest into his glory, that he thought in his agony of all the children of Eve ? “ The Heavens proclaim a new freedom, new nations, new conquests, new glory won in nobler conflicts, a new peace unshaken by terrors or by vain seductions, a peace that the world scoffs at but cannot take away. sun, the “ Behold, oh Spirit! suppliant before thy lofty altars, alone in gloomy forests, wandering in desert seas; from the snowy Andes to Lebaron, from Hibernia to the rugged Haiti, dispersed through every shore, but with one heart in Thee, “We implore thee-peaceable spirit, descend once more, benignant to thy worshippers, benignant to the benighted heathens that know thee not: descend and re-create ; revive our hearts numbed by doubt, and let the victor be the divine reward of the vanquished. " Descend, thou love! Crush proud passions in our soul : inspire us with thoughts that the conscious final day may not wish changed ; let thy fostering virtue improve and strengthen thy gift, even as the sun develops the blossom in its inert germ, “ Which blossom, nevertheless, would yet die in its inertness, and never unfold the pride of its fulgent hues, unless the same mild radiance of the unweary nourisher, no less than giver of life, were to rain down its blissful influence from the sky. “We implore thee, descend ! A fanning breeze, a consoling air into the drooping thoughts of the unhappy; a whirlwind into the elated thoughts of the violent: breathe into them a feeling of dismay that may incline him to mercy. 66 Let the pour eyes to Heaven, his heritage, think in whose image he was made, and turn his sorrow into joy: let those on whom earthly gifts were amply bestowed amply bestow them on others, but with that modest silence, with that friendly mien, which enhance the value of the gift. Breathe, oh, spirit, from the ineffable smile of our children, overspread with chaste blushes the blooming cheeks of our maidens: bestow thy pure joys on the virgin inmates of the cloister, hallow with modesty the tender love of brides. “ Temper with prudence the confident spirit of our youth, bear up manly purpose to an infallible aim, crown our gray hairs with holy desires, shine in the wandering look of those who die in hope.' We shall conclude this article by a translation of the “ Ode on the Death of Napoleon.”. We are aware that several English versions of this masterpiece, in different metres, already exist. If we add one more to the number, it is only because we are persuaded that by a stricter adherence to the original measure, we have, with a little more pains, endeavoured to give our own verse a closer resemblance to the original. It is a subject on which the whole galaxy of poets who illustrated the late generation, have exhausted their powers. It is, nevertheless, remarkable that the country who produced the greatest hero, should also give birth to the bard, whose Dirge will reach the remotest posterity with him. our THE FIFTH OF MAY, 1821. No more!--as senseless, motionless, Th' unconscious frame was left, So great a spirit reft, |