Beginnings of Modern Poetry.

There was a larger audience than usual at the third lecture by Professor Marsh last evening on the Peginnings of Modern Poetry. In his previous lectures he dealt with poetry in Provence and France, last evening with that of Italy. After the downfall of the empire, in the midst of the barbaric invasions and factional quarrels, Italy still kept her spirit of superiority over all surrounding races. She clung to the idea of Roman jurisprudence that all men are equal, hence she would not accept the spirit of feudalism and so fell into a number of small, disconnected states between whom no national spirit was possible. More than this, the domination of the Roman church worked directly against the national spirit.

Now these two causes made of no effect the great mass of material Italy had at hand,-the tradition of learning she had never lost and the cosmopolitan culture her central position won for her. When with the rise of the great commercial powers, a desire for broader culture was felt, Italian poets fashioned their works entirely from the models of France and Provence. Their poetry, as seen in the productions of the Court of Frederick II., was utterly devoid of originality. It was an artificial imitation of accepted models, without thought or feeling, merely art for art's sake.

Such poetry could not long hold sway. Soon there were men who thought seriously and felt earnestly. Such a man was Saint Francis, who led a merry life in his youth, but feeling a deep sense of the miserableness of common men, he turned to a life of quiet but joyful contemplation and fervid expression.

It was such men, joined with the advance in scientific thought, that gave Dante the impulse to his works. To Dante nothing was too great or too small. All that engaged other men's minds interested his. He found his material in philosophy, religion, art, politics, and learning alike, and out of this most disconnected material, he constructed his divine comedy. Through it there runs one fundamental idea, - the idea of love. This idea of love cannot be said to be Dante's distinctively, for it is rather the fusion of three ideas of love which he found prevalent in the world: - the Platonic love, or the desire of the incomplete to make itself perfect, whose ideal was the passion for pure wisdom and pure beauty; the Christian love, which finds its source in tenderness and infinite pity; and the chivalric love, typified by Dante's own love for Beatrice. In this love there was no hope of attaining his beloved, but even after her death, it was her memory that he served and her inspiration that leads him on through the awful trials he portrays in his Divine comedy. With Dante begins the movement that led to the Renaissance, and Professor Marsh, in his next lecture, will consider the growth and fruits of this movement.