"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.