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We had reached that stage of the banquet when the game was about to be served the invisible choir of boys' voices had just completed an enchanting stornello with an accompaniment of mandolines when a stillness, strange and unaccountable, fell upon the company a pause an ominous hush, as though some person supreme in authority had suddenly entered the room and commanded "Silence!"
I may see my mistress Italy embowered in a belfry, a fresco, the scope of a Piazza, the lilt of a Stornello, the fragrance of a legend. If I don't find a legend to hand I may, as lief as not, invent one. It shall be a legend fitted close to the soul of a fact, if I succeed: and if I fail, put me behind you and take down your four volumes of Rio, or your four-and-twenty of Rosini.
That is to say, the first part of the rispetto consists of four or six lines with alternate rhymes, while one or more couplets, called the ripresa, complete the poem. The stornello, or ritournelle, never exceeds three lines, and owes its name to the return which it makes at the end of the last line to the rhyme given by the emphatic word of the first.
Zara, who among her other accomplishments had the secret of making coffee to perfection, promised laughingly to make it extra well, and flitted from the room, singing softly as she went a fragment of the Neapolitan Stornello: "Fior di mortelle Queste manine tue son tanto belle! Fior di limone Ti voglio far morire di passione Salta! lari lira." The letter Zara had brought me was from Mrs.
Well; for many a year did the song of the peasants rise up from the fields and oliveyards unnoticed by the good townsfolk taking their holiday at the Tuscan villa; but one day, somewhere in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the long-drawn chant of the rispetto, telling perhaps how the singer's sweetheart was beautiful as the star Diana, so beautiful as a baby that the Pope christened her with his own hands; the quavering nasal cadence of the stornello saying by chance
Browning, in his poem of 'Fra Lippo Lippi, has accustomed English ears to one common species of the stornello, which sets out with the name of a flower, and rhymes with it, as thus: Fior di narciso. Prigionero d'amore mi son reso, Nel rimirare il tuo leggiadro viso.
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