The Life and Times of Girolamo Savonarola
by John Abraham Heraud (9781458923974)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER TIL THE MANHOOD OF SAVONAROLA. Savonarola's poetic studies?His religions enthusiasm?Difference between his and his father's dispositions?State of the World and the Church?Specimen of Savonarola's lyric poetry?Festival of St. George at Ferrara?Savonarola enters the monastery at Bologna?Letter to his father. The religious enthusiasm of Savonarola was doubtless sustained by his poetical temperament. It has been said that every poet is a religious man?it may be asserted with more truth that, in the highest sense, every religious man is a poet. The literature of the Italian poets was, in the fifteenth century, calculated to corroborate the pious predilections of the student. It was also a study which the times were far from discouraging; nay, it is charged against the leading men of the age, that ' they admired the elegance of a finely cadenced sonnet more than the majesty and simplicity of the Scriptures.' This, however, may apply to the critical taste of a period immediately succeeding, rather than to that of which we are writing. The present was an age of production, not of criticism. Savonarola felt as a poet, not as a man of taste. He felt as Petrarch and Dante, as Fol- Chetto and Sordello had felt before him; that is, his enthusiasm was not excited by his admiration of a fine poem; but the fine poems he was qualified to write owed their origin to the inherent enthusiasm of CH. III. DANTE, PETRARCH, AND BOCCACCIO. 33 the poetic spirit. The Tuscan language and poesy were more than the mere amusement of his leisure hours. They could not fail of becoming pregnant sources of inspiration, and most valuable means of educating a mind of the highest order. The bold and mighty spirit of Dante, for instance, involved the whole culture of his time, clearly mirroring ...

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