Of religious songs there are a vast number in Sicily, and the stock is perpetually fed by the pious rhyme tournaments held in celebration of notable saints' days at the village fairs. On such occasions the image or relics of the saints are exhibited in the public square, and the competitors, the assembled poetic talent of the neighbourhood, proceed, one after the other, to improvise verses in his honour. If they succeed in gaining the suffrage of their audience, which may amount to five or six thousand persons, they go home liberally rewarded. Along with these saintly eulogiums may be mentioned a style of composition more ancient than edifying--the Sicilian parodies. A pious or complimentary song is travestied into a piece of coarse abuse, or a sample of that unblushing, astounding irreverence which sometimes startles the most hardened sceptic, travelling in countries where the empire of Catholicism has been least shaken--in Tyrol, for instance, and in Spain. We cannot be sure whether the Sicilian parodist deliberately intends to be profane, or is only indifferent as to what weapons he uses in his eagerness to cast ridicule upon a rival versifier--the last hypothesis seems to me to be the most plausible; but it takes nothing from the significance of his profanity as it stands. It is pleasant to turn from these several sections of Sicilian verse, which, though valuable in helping us to know the people from whom they spring, for the most part have but small merits when judged as poetry, to the stream of genuine song which flows side by side with them: a stream, fresh, clear, pure: a poesy always true in its artless art, generally bright and ingenious in its imagery, sometimes tersely felicitous in its expression. In his love lyrics, and but rarely save in them, the Sicilian _popolano_ rises from the rhymester to the poet.
The most characteristic forms of the love-songs of Sicily are those of the _ciuri_, called in Tuscany _stornelli_, and the _canzuni_, called in Tuscany _rispetti_. The _ciuri_ (flowers) are couplets or triplets beginning with the name of a flower, with which the other line or lines should rhyme. They abound throughout the island, and notwithstanding the poor estimation in which the peasants hold them, and the difficulty of persuading them that they are worth putting on record, a very dainty compliment--just the thing to figure on a valentine--may often be found compressed into their diminutive compass. To turn such airy nothings into a language foreign and uncongenial to them, is like manipulating a soap-bubble: the bubble vanishes, and we have only a little soapy water left in the hollow of our hand: a simile which unhappily is not far from holding good of attempts at translating any species of Italian popular poetry. It is true that in _Fra Lippo Lippi_ there are two or three charming imitations of the _stornello_; but, then, Mr Browning is the poet who, of all others, has got most inside of the Italian mind. Here is an _aubade_, which will give a notion of the unsubstantial stuff the _ciuri_ are made of:
