He did not see them again, but he continued to smile at the anxieties of his friends, who had too great reason to think that the end was much nearer than Leopardi himself supposed. On the night of the 14th of June, while they were waiting for the carriage which was to take them into the country, where they intended to pass the time together and sup at daybreak, Leopardi felt so great a difficulty of breathing—he called it asthma, but it was dropsy of the heart—that he begged them to send for a doctor. The doctor on seeing the sick man took Ranieri apart, and bade him fetch a priest without delay, and while they waited the coming of the friar, Leopardi spoke now and then with them, but sank rapidly. Finally, says Ranieri, "Leopardi opened his eyes, now larger even than their wont, and looked at me more fixedly than before. 'I can't see you,' he said, with a kind of sigh. And he ceased to breathe, and his pulse and heart beat no more; and at the same moment the Friar Felice of the barefoot order of St. Augustine entered the chamber, while I, quite beside myself, called with a loud voice on him who had been my friend, my brother, my father, and who answered me nothing, and yet seemed to gaze upon me.... His death was inconceivable to me; the others were dismayed and mute; there arose between the good friar and myself the most cruel and painful dispute, ... I madly contending that my friend was still alive, and beseeching him with tears to accompany with the offices of religion the passing of that great soul. But he, touching again and again the pulse and the heart, continually answered that the spirit had taken flight. At last, a spontaneous and solemn silence fell upon all in the room; the friar knelt beside the dead, and we all followed his example. Then after long and profound meditation he prayed, and we prayed with him."

In another place Ranieri says: "The malady of Leopardi was indefinable, for having its spring in the most secret sources of life, it was like life itself, inexplicable. The bones softened and dissolved away, refusing their frail support to the flesh that covered them. The flesh itself grew thinner and more lifeless every day, for the organs of nutrition denied their office of assimilation. The lungs, cramped into a space too narrow, and not sound themselves, expanded with difficulty. With difficulty the heart freed itself from the lymph with which a slow absorption burdened it. The blood, which ill renewed itself in the hard and painful respiration, returned cold, pale, and sluggish to the enfeebled veins. And in fine, the whole mysterious circle of life, moving with such great effort, seemed from moment to moment about to pause forever. Perhaps the great cerebral sponge, beginning and end of that mysterious circle, had prepotently sucked up all the vital forces, and itself consumed in a brief time all that was meant to suffice the whole system for a long period. However it may be, the life of Leopardi was not a course, as in most men, but truly a precipitation toward death."

Some years before he died, Leopardi had a presentiment of his death, and his end was perhaps hastened by the nervous shock of the terror produced by the cholera, which was then raging in Naples. At that time the body of a Neapolitan minister of state who had died of cholera was cast into the common burial-pit at Naples—such was the fear of contagion, and so rapidly were the dead hurried to the grave. A heavy bribe secured the remains of Leopardi from this fate, and his dust now reposes in a little church on the road to Pozzuoli.

II

"In the years of boyhood," says the Neapolitan critic, Francesco de Sanctis, "Leopardi saw his youth vanish forever; he lived obscure, and achieved posthumous envy and renown; he was rich and noble, and he suffered from want and despite; no woman's love ever smiled upon him, the solitary lover of his own mind, to which he gave the names of Sylvia, Aspasia, and Nerina. Therefore, with a precocious and bitter penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life, alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections which have returned to the heart for want of nourishment in the world. Mournful colloquies and yet pleasing, where man is the suicidal vulture perpetually preying upon himself, and caressing the wound that drags him to the grave.... The first cause of his sorrow is Recanati: the intellect, capable of the universe, feels itself oppressed in an obscure village, cruel to the body and deadly to the spirit.... He leaves Recanati; he arrives in Rome; we believe him content at last, and he too believes it. Brief illusion! Rome, Bologna, Milan, Florence, Naples, are all different places, where he forever meets the same man, himself. Read the first letter that he writes from Rome: 'In the great things I see I do not feel the least pleasure, for I know that they are marvelous, but I do not feel it, and I assure you that their multitude and grandeur wearied me after the first day.'... To Leopardi it is rarely given to interest himself in any spectacle of nature, and he never does it without a sudden and agonized return to himself.... Malign and heartless men have pretended that Leopardi was a misanthrope, a fierce hater and enemy of the human race!... Love, inexhaustible and almost ideal, was the supreme craving of that angelic heart, and never left it during life. 'Love me, for God's sake,' he beseeches his brother Carlo; 'I have need of love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life.' And in truth it may be said that pain and love form the twofold poetry of his life."

Leopardi lived in Italy during the long contest between the Classic and Romantic schools, and it may be said that in him many of the leading ideas of both parties were reconciled. His literary form was as severe and sculpturesque as that of Alfieri himself, whilst the most subjective and introspective of the Romantic poets did not so much color the world with his own mental and spiritual hue as Leopardi. It is not plain whether he ever declared himself for one theory or the other. He was a contributor to the literary journal which the partisans of the Romantic School founded at Florence; but he was a man so weighed upon by his own sense of the futility and vanity of all things that he could have had little spirit for mere literary contentions. His admirers try hard to make out that he was positively and actively patriotic; and it is certain that in his earlier youth he disagreed with his father's conservative opinions, and despised the existing state of things; but later in life he satirized the aspirations and purposes of progress, though without sympathizing with those of reaction.

The poem which his chief claim to classification with the poets militant of his time rests upon is that addressed "To Italy". Those who have read even only a little of Leopardi have read it; and I must ask their patience with a version which drops the irregular rhyme of the piece for the sake of keeping its peculiar rhythm and measure.

My native land, I see the walls and arches, The columns and the statues, and the lonely Towers of our ancestors, But not their glory, not The laurel and the steel that of old time Our great forefathers bore. Disarmed now, Naked thou showest thy forehead and thy breast! O me, how many wounds, What bruises and what blood! How do I see thee, Thou loveliest Lady! Unto Heaven I cry, And to the world: "Say, say, Who brought her unto this?" To this and worse, For both her arms are loaded down with chains, So that, unveiled and with disheveled hair, She crouches all forgotten and forlorn, Hiding her beautiful face Between her knees, and weeps. Weep, weep, for well thou may'st, my Italy! Born, as thou wert, to conquest, Alike in evil and in prosperous sort! If thy sweet eyes were each a living stream, Thou could'st not weep enough For all thy sorrow and for all thy shame. For thou wast queen, and now thou art a slave. Who speaks of thee or writes, That thinking on thy glory in the past But says, "She was great once, but is no more." Wherefore, oh, wherefore? Where is the ancient strength, The valor and the arms, and constancy? Who rent the sword from thee? Who hath betrayed thee? What art, or what toil, Or what o'erwhelming force, Hath stripped thy robe and golden wreath from thee? How did'st thou fall, and when, From such a height unto a depth so low? Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee, None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone Will fight and fall for thee. Grant me, O Heaven, my blood Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts! Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms, Of wheels, of voices, and of drums; In foreign fields afar Thy children fight and fall. Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see, A tumult as of infantry and horse, And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords Like lightning among clouds. Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close? For what, in yonder fields, Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods, For other lands Italian swords are drawn! Oh, misery for him who dies in war, Not for his native shores and his beloved, His wife and children dear, But by the foes of others For others' cause, and cannot dying say, "Dear land of mine, The life thou gavest me I give thee back."

This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man's blood; his real country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note in this address to Death.

And thou, that ever from my life's beginning I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity: If ever celebrated Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted To recompense the insult That vulgar terror offers Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen To prayers so rarely uttered: Shut to the light forever, Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish!

I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long, hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the reestablishment of all the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration, for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet's song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe with the invalid's loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death, might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no promise of better things in their earthly lot.

Leopardi's malady was such that when he did not positively suffer he had still the memory of pain, and he was oppressed with a dreary ennui, from which he could not escape. Death, oblivion, annihilation, are the thoughts upon which he broods, and which fill his verse. The passing color of other men's minds is the prevailing cast of his, and he, probably with far more sincerity than any other poet, nursed his despair in such utterances as this:

TO HIMSELF.

Now thou shalt rest forever, O weary heart! The last deceit is ended, For I believed myself immortal. Cherished Hopes, and beloved delusions, And longings to be deluded,—all are perished! Rest thee forever! Oh, greatly, Heart, hast thou palpitated. There is nothing Worthy to move thee more, nor is earth worthy Thy sighs. For life is only Bitterness and vexation; earth is only A heap of dust. So rest thee! Despair for the last time. To our race Fortune Never gave any gift but death. Disdain, then, Thyself and Nature and the Power Occultly reigning to the common ruin: Scorn, heart, the infinite emptiness of all things!

Nature was so cruel a stepmother to this man that he could see nothing but harm even in her apparent beneficence, and his verse repeats again and again his dark mistrust of the very loveliness which so keenly delights his sense. One of his early poems, called "The Quiet after the Storm", strikes the key in which nearly all his songs are pitched. The observation of nature is very sweet and honest, and I cannot see that the philosophy in its perversion of the relations of physical and spiritual facts is less mature than that of his later work: it is a philosophy of which the first conception cannot well differ from the final expression.

... See yon blue sky that breaks The clouds above the mountain in the west! The fields disclose themselves, And in the valley bright the river runs. All hearts are glad; on every side Arise the happy sounds Of toil begun anew. The workman, singing, to the threshold comes, With work in hand, to judge the sky, Still humid, and the damsel next, On his report, comes forth to brim her pail With the fresh-fallen rain. The noisy fruiterers From lane to lane resume Their customary cry. The sun looks out again, and smiles upon The houses and the hills. Windows and doors Are opened wide; and on the far-off road You hear the tinkling bells and rattling wheels Of travelers that set out upon their journey.

Every heart is glad; So grateful and so sweet When is our life as now?

* * * * *

O Pleasure, child of Pain, Vain joy which is the fruit Of bygone suffering overshadowed And wrung with cruel fears Of death, whom life abhors; Wherein, in long suspense, Silent and cold and pale, Man sat, and shook and shuddered to behold Lightnings and clouds and winds, Furious in his offense! Beneficent Nature, these, These are thy bounteous gifts: These, these are the delights Thou offerest unto mortals! To escape From pain is bliss to us; Anguish thou scatterest broadcast, and our woes Spring up spontaneous, and that little joy Born sometimes, for a miracle and show, Of terror is our mightiest gain. O man, Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate If now and then relief Thou hast from pain, and blest When death shall come to heal thee of all pain!

"The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime, and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord, while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again." This is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi's death, when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi's style, "without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of contrasts, without poetic leaven," hard to read. "Despoil those verses of their masterly polish," he says, "reduce those thoughts to prose, and you will see how little they are akin to poetry."

I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi's work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage which this critic desires for it. Yet, after doing my worst, I am not wholly able to agree with him. It seems to me that there is the indestructible charm in it which, wherever we find it, we must call poetry. It is true that "its strange sweetness wins you again and again," and that this "lonely pipe of death" thrills and solemnly delights as no other stop has done. Let us hear it again, as the poet sounds it, figuring himself a Syrian shepherd, guarding his flock by night, and weaving his song under the Eastern moon:

O flock that liest at rest, O blessed thou That knowest not thy fate, however hard, How utterly I envy thee! Not merely that thou goest almost free Of all this weary pain,— That every misery and every toil And every fear thou straightway dost forget,— But most because thou knowest not ennui When on the grass thou liest in the shade. I see thee tranquil and content, And great part of thy years Untroubled by ennui thou passest thus. I likewise in the shadow, on the grass. Lie, and a dull disgust beclouds My soul, and I am goaded with a spur, So that, reposing, I am farthest still From finding peace or place. And yet I want for naught, And have not had till now a cause for tears. What is thy bliss, how much, I cannot tell; but thou art fortunate.

* * * * *

Or, it may be, my thought Errs, running thus to others' destiny; May be, to everything, Wherever born, in cradle or in fold, That day is terrible when it was born.

It is the same note, the same voice; the theme does not change, but perhaps it is deepened in this ode:

ON THE LIKENESS OP A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN CARVEN UPON HER TOMB.

Such wast thou: now under earth A skeleton and dust. O'er dust and bones Immovably and vainly set, and mute, Looking upon the flight of centuries, Sole keeper of memory And of regret is this fair counterfeit Of loveliness now vanished. That sweet look, Which made men tremble when it fell on them, As now it falls on me; that lip, which once, Like some full vase of sweets, Ran over with delight; that fair neck, clasped By longing, and that soft and amorous hand, Which often did impart An icy thrill unto the hand it touched; That breast, which visibly Blanched with its beauty him who looked on it— All these things were, and now Dust art thou, filth, a fell And hideous sight hidden beneath a stone. Thus fate hath wrought its will Upon the semblance that to us did seem Heaven's vividest image! Eternal mystery Of mortal being! To-day the ineffable Fountain of thoughts and feelings vast and high, Beauty reigns sovereign, and seems Like splendor thrown afar From some immortal essence on these sands, To give our mortal state A sign and hope secure of destinies Higher than human, and of fortunate realms, And golden worlds unknown. To-morrow, at a touch, Loathsome to see, abominable, abject, Becomes the thing that was All but angelical before; And from men's memories All that its loveliness Inspired forever faults and fades away.

Ineffable desires And visions high and pure Rise in the happy soul, Lulled by the sound of cunning harmonies Whereon the spirit floats, As at his pleasure floats Some fearless swimmer over the deep sea; But if a discord strike The wounded sense, to naught All that fair paradise in an instant falls.

Mortality! if thou Be wholly frail and vile, Be only dust and shadow, how canst thou So deeply feel? And if thou be In part divine, how can thy will and thought By things so poor and base So easily be awakened and quenched?

Let us touch for the last time this pensive chord, and listen to its response of hopeless love. This poem, in which he turns to address the spirit of the poor child whom he loved boyishly at Recanati, is pathetic with the fact that possibly she alone ever reciprocated the tenderness with which his heart was filled.

TO SYLVIA.

Sylvia, dost thou remember In this that season of thy mortal being When from thine eyes shone beauty, In thy shy glances fugitive and smiling, And joyously and pensively the borders Of childhood thou did'st traverse?

All day the quiet chambers And the ways near resounded To thy perpetual singing, When thou, intent upon some girlish labor, Sat'st utterly contented, With the fair future brightening in thy vision. It was the fragrant month of May, and ever Thus thou thy days beguiledst.

I, leaving my fair studies, Leaving my manuscripts and toil-stained volumes, Wherein I spent the better Part of myself and of my young existence, Leaned sometimes idly from my father's windows, And listened to the music of thy singing, And to thy hand, that fleetly Ran o'er the threads of webs that thou wast weaving. I looked to the calm heavens, Unto the golden lanes and orchards, And unto the far sea and to the mountains; No mortal tongue may utter What in my heart I felt then.

O Sylvia mine, what visions, What hopes, what hearts, we had in that far season! How fair and good before us Seemed human life and fortune! When I remember hope so great, beloved, An utter desolation And bitterness o'erwhelm me, And I return to mourn my evil fortune. O Nature, faithless Nature, Wherefore dost thou not give us That which thou promisest? Wherefore deceivest, With so great guile, thy children?

Thou, ere the freshness of thy spring was withered. Stricken by thy fell malady, and vanquished, Did'st perish, O my darling! and the blossom Of thy years sawest; Thy heart was never melted At the sweet praise, now of thy raven tresses, Now of thy glances amorous and bashful; Never with thee the holiday-free maidens Reasoned of love and loving.

Ah! briefly perished, likewise, My own sweet hope; and destiny denied me Youth, even in my childhood! Alas, alas, beloved, Companion of my childhood! Alas, my mourned hope! how art thou vanished Out of my place forever! This is that world? the pleasures, The love, the labors, the events, we talked of, These, when we prattled long ago together? Is this the fortune of our race, O Heaven? At the truth's joyless dawning, Thou fellest, sad one, with thy pale hand pointing Unto cold death, and an unknown and naked Sepulcher in the distance.

III

These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon his prose writings—his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm—and his unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame, and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have of hovering about the idea of death—of playing with the great catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi's poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life, though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain with an appeal or apostrophe to death—not the real death, that comes with a sharp, quick agony, or "after long lying in bed", after many days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we abandon—if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him. There is little doubt that Leopardi was sincere, and there is little reason why he should not have been so, for life could give him nothing but pain.

De Sanctis, whom I have quoted already, and who speaks, I believe, with rather more authority than any other modern Italian critic, and certainly with great clearness and acuteness, does not commit himself to specific praise of Leopardi's work. But he seems to regard him as an important expression, if not force or influence, and he has some words about him, at the close of his "History of Italian Literature", which have interested me, not only for the estimate of Leopardi which they embody, but for the singularly distinct statement which they make of the modern literary attitude. I should not, myself, have felt that Leopardi represented this, but I am willing that the reader should feel it, if he can. De Sanctis has been speaking of the Romantic period in Italy, when he says:

"Giacomo Leopardi marks the close of this period. Metaphysics at war with theology had ended in this attempt at reconciliation. The multiplicity of systems had discredited science itself. Metaphysics was regarded as a revival of theology. The Idea seemed a substitute for providence. Those philosophies of history, of religion, of humanity, had the air of poetical inventions.... That reconciliation between the old and new, tolerated as a temporary political necessity, seemed at bottom a profanation of science, a moral weakness.... Faith in revelation had been wanting; faith in philosophy itself was now wanting. Mystery re-appeared. The philosopher knew as much as the peasant. Of this mystery, Giacomo Leopardi was the echo in the solitude of his thought and his pain. His skepticism announced the dissolution of this theologico-metaphysical world, and inaugurated the reign of the arid True, of the Real. His songs are the most profound and occult voices of that laborious transition called the nineteenth century. That which has importance is not the brilliant exterior of that century of progress, and it is not without irony that he speaks of the progressive destinies of mankind. That which has importance is the exploration of one's own breast, the inner world, virtue, liberty, love, all the ideals of religion, of science, and of poetry—shadows and illusions in the presence of reason, yet which warm the heart, and will not die. Mystery destroys the intellectual world; it leaves the moral world intact. This tenacious life of the inner world, despite the fall of all theological and metaphysical worlds, is the originality of Leopardi, and gives his skepticism a religious stamp. ... Every one feels in it a new creation. The instrument of this renovation is criticism.... The sense of the real continues to develop itself; the positive sciences come to the top, and cast out all the ideal and systematic constructions. New dogmas lose credit. Criticism remains intact. The patient labor of analysis begins again.... Socialism re-appears in the political order, positivism in the intellectual order. The word is no longer liberty, but justice. ... Literature also undergoes transformation. It rejects classes, distinctions, privileges. The ugly stands beside the beautiful; or rather, there is no longer ugly or beautiful, neither ideal nor real, neither infinite nor finite.... There is but one thing only, the Living."



GIUSEPPE GIUSTI

I

Giuseppe Giusti, who is the greatest Italian satirist of this century, and is in some respects the greatest Italian poet, was born in 1809 at Mossummano in Tuscany, of parentage noble and otherwise distinguished; one of his paternal ancestors had assisted the liberal Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo to compile his famous code, and his mother's father had been a republican in 1799. There was also an hereditary taste for literature in the family; and Giusti says, in one of his charming letters, that almost as soon as he had learned to speak, his father taught him the ballad of Count Ugolino, and he adds, "I have always had a passion for song, a passion for verses, and more than a passion for Dante." His education passed later into the hands of a priest, who had spent much time as a teacher in Vienna, and was impetuous, choleric, and thoroughly German in principle. "I was given him to be taught," says Giusti, "but he undertook to tame me"; and he remembered reading with him a Plutarch for youth, and the "Lives of the Saints", but chiefly was, as he says, so "caned, contraried, and martyred" by him, that, when the priest wept at their final parting, the boy could by no means account for the burst of tenderness. Giusti was then going to Florence to be placed in a school where he had the immeasurable good fortune to fall into the hands of one whose gentleness and wisdom he remembered through life. "Drea Francioni," he says, "had not time to finish his work, but he was the first and the only one to put into my heart the need and love of study. Oh, better far than stuffing the head with Latin, with histories and with fables! Endear study, even if you teach nothing; this is the great task!" And he afterward dedicated his book on Tuscan proverbs, which he thought one of his best performances, to this beloved teacher.

He had learned to love study, yet from this school, and from others to which he was afterward sent, he came away with little Latin and no Greek; but, what is more important, he began life about this time as a poet—by stealing a sonnet. His theft was suspected, but could not be proved. "And so," he says of his teacher and himself, "we remained, he in his doubt and I in my lie. Who would have thought from this ugly beginning that I should really have gone on to make sonnets of my own?... The Muses once known, the vice grew upon me, and from my twelfth to my fifteenth year I rasped, and rasped, and rasped, until finally I came out with a sonnet to Italy, represented in the usual fashion, by the usual matron weeping as usual over her highly estimable misfortunes. In school, under certain priests who were more Chinese than Italian, and without knowing whether Italy were round or square, long or short, how that sonnet to Italy should get into my head I don't know. I only know that it was found beautiful, and I was advised to hide it,"—that being the proper thing to do with patriotic poetry in those days.

After leaving school, Giusti passed three idle years with his family, and then went to study the humanities at Pisa, where he found the cafe better adapted to their pursuit than the University, since he could there unite with it the pursuit of the exact science of billiards. He represents himself in his letters and verses to have led just the life at Pisa which was most agreeable to former governments of Italy,—a life of sensual gayety, abounding in the small excitements which turn the thought from the real interests of the time, and weaken at once the moral and intellectual fiber. But how far a man can be credited to his own disgrace is one of the unsettled questions: the repentant and the unrepentant are so apt to over-accuse themselves. It is very wisely conjectured by some of Giusti's biographers that he did not waste himself so much as he says in the dissipations of student life at Pisa. At any rate, it is certain that he began there to make those sarcastic poems upon political events which are so much less agreeable to a paternal despotism than almost any sort of love-songs. He is said to have begun by writing in the manner of Beranger, and several critics have labored to prove the similarity of their genius, with scarcely more effect, it seems to us, than those who would make him out the Heinrich Heine of Italy, as they call him. He was a political satirist, whose success was due to his genius, but who can never be thoroughly appreciated by a foreigner, or even an Italian not intimately acquainted with the affairs of his times; and his reputation must inevitably diminish with the waning interest of men in the obsolete politics of those vanished kingdoms and duchies. How mean and little were all their concerns is scarcely credible; but Giusti tells an adventure of his, at the period, which throws light upon some of the springs of action in Tuscany. He had been arrested for a supposed share in applause supposed revolutionary at the theater; he boldly denied that he had been at the play. "If you were not at the theater, how came your name on the list of the accused?" demanded the logical commissary. "Perhaps," answered Giusti, "the spies have me so much in mind that they see me where I am not.... Here," he continues, "the commissary fell into a rage, but I remained firm, and cited the Count Mastiani in proof, with whom the man often dined,"—Mastiani being governor in Pisa and the head of society. "At the name of Mastiani there seemed to pass before the commissary a long array of stewed and roast, eaten and to be eaten, so that he instantly turned and said to me, 'Go, and at any rate take this summons for a paternal admonition.'" Ever since the French Revolution of 1830, and the sympathetic movements in Italy, Giusti had written political satires which passed from hand to hand in manuscript copies, the possession of which was rendered all the more eager and relishing by the pleasure of concealing them from spies; so that for a defective copy a person by no means rich would give as much as ten scudi. When a Swiss printed edition appeared in 1844, half the delight in them was gone; the violation of the law being naturally so dear to the human heart that, when combined with patriotism, it is almost a rapture.

But, in the midst of his political satirizing, Giusti felt the sting of one who is himself a greater satirist than any, when he will, though he is commonly known for a sentimentalist. The poet fell in love very seriously and, it proved, very unhappily, as he has recorded in three or four poems of great sweetness and grace, but no very characteristic merit. This passion is improbably believed to have had a disastrous effect upon Giusti's health, and ultimately to have shortened his life; but then the Italians always like to have their poets agonizzanti, at least. Like a true humorist, Giusti has himself taken both sides of the question; professing himself properly heart-broken in the poems referred to, and in a letter written late in life, after he had encountered his faded love at his own home in Pescia, making a jest of any reconciliation or renewal of the old passion between them.

"Apropos of the heart," says Giusti in this letter, "you ask me about a certain person who once had mine, whole and sound, roots and all. I saw her this morning in passing, out of the corner of my eye, and I know that she is well and enjoying herself. As to our coming together again, the case, if it were once remote, is now impossible; for you can well imagine that, all things considered, I could never be such a donkey as to tempt her to a comparison of me with myself. I am certain that, after having tolerated me for a day or two for simple appearance' sake, she would find some good excuse for planting me a yard outside the door. In many, obstinacy increases with the ails and wrinkles; but in me, thank Heaven, there comes a meekness, a resignation, not to be expressed. Perhaps it has not happened otherwise with her. In that case we could accommodate ourselves, and talk as long as the evening lasted of magnesia, of quinine, and of nervines; lament, not the rising and sinking of the heart, but of the barometer; talk, not of the theater and all the rest, but whether it is better to crawl out into the sun like lizards, or stay at home behind battened windows. 'Good-evening, my dear, how have you been to-day?' 'Eh! you know, my love, the usual rheumatism; but for the rest I don't complain.' 'Did you sleep well last night?' 'Not so bad; and you?' 'O, little or none at all; and I got up feeling as if all my bones were broken.' 'My idol, take a little laudanum. Think that when you are not well I suffer with you. And your appetite, how is it?' 'O, don't speak of it! I can't get anything down.' 'My soul, if you don't eat you'll not be able to keep up.' 'But, my heart, what would you do if the mouthfuls stuck in your throat?' 'Take a little quassia; ... but, dost thou remember, once—?' 'Yes, I remember; but once was once,' ... and so forth, and so forth. Then some evening, if a priest came in, we could take a hand at whist with a dummy, and so live on to the age of crutches in a passion whose phases are confided to the apothecary rather than to the confessor."



Giusti's first political poems had been inspired by the revolutionary events of 1830 in France; and he continued part of that literary force which, quite as much as the policy of Cavour, has educated Italians for freedom and independence. When the French revolution of 1848 took place, and the responsive outbreaks followed all over Europe, Tuscany drove out her Grand Duke, as France drove out her king, and, still emulous of that wise exemplar, put the novelist Guerrazzi at the head of her affairs, as the next best thing to such a poet as Lamartine, which she had not. The affair ended in the most natural way; the Florentines under the supposed popular government became very tired of themselves, and called back their Grand Duke, who came again with Austrian bayonets to support him in the affections of his subjects, where he remained secure until the persuasive bayonets disappeared before Garibaldi ten years later.

Throughout these occurrences the voice of Giusti was heard whenever that of good sense and a temperate zeal for liberty could be made audible. He was an aristocrat by birth and at heart, and he looked upon the democratic shows of the time with distrust, if not dislike, though he never lost faith in the capacity of the Italians for an independent national government. His broken health would not let him join the Tuscan volunteers who marched to encounter the Austrians in Lombardy; and though he was once elected member of the representative body from Pescia, he did not shine in it, and refused to be chosen a second time. His letters of this period afford the liveliest and truest record of feeling in Tuscany during that memorable time of alternating hopes and fears, generous impulses, and mean derelictions, and they strike me as among the best letters in any language.

Giusti supported the Grand Duke's return philosophically, with a sarcastic serenity of spirit, and something also of the indifference of mortal sickness. His health was rapidly breaking, and in March, 1850, he died very suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs.

II

In noticing Giusti's poetry I have a difficulty already hinted, for if I presented some of the pieces which gave him his greatest fame among his contemporaries, I should be doing, as far as my present purpose is concerned, a very unprofitable thing. The greatest part of his poetry was inspired by the political events or passions of the time at which it was written, and, except some five or six pieces, it is all of a political cast. These events are now many of them grown unimportant and obscure, and the passions are, for the most part, quite extinct; so that it would be useless to give certain of his most popular pieces as historical, while others do not represent him at his best as a poet. Some degree of social satire is involved; but the poems are principally light, brilliant mockeries of transient aspects of politics, or outcries against forgotten wrongs, or appeals for long-since-accomplished or defeated purposes. We know how dreary this sort of poetry generally is in our own language, after the occasion is once past, and how nothing but the enforced privacy of a desolate island could induce us to read, however ardent our sympathies may have been, the lyrics about slavery or the war, except in very rare cases. The truth is, the Muse, for a lady who has seen so much of life and the ways of the world, is an excessively jealous personification, and is apt to punish with oblivion a mixed devotion at her shrine. The poet who desires to improve and exalt his time must make up his mind to a double martyrdom,—first, to be execrated by vast numbers of respectable people, and then to be forgotten by all. It is a great pity, but it cannot be helped. It is chiefly your

Rogue of canzonets and serenades

who survives. Anacreon lives; but the poets who appealed to their Ionian fellow-citizens as men and brethren, and lectured them upon their servility and their habits of wine-bibbing and of basking away the dearest rights of humanity in the sun, who ever heard of them? I do not mean to say that Giusti ever lectured his generation; he was too good an artist for that; but at least one Italian critic forebodes that the figure he made in the patriotic imagination must diminish rapidly with the establishment of the very conditions he labored to bring about. The wit of much that he said must grow dim with the fading remembrance of what provoked it; the sting lie pointless and painless in the dust of those who writhed under it,—so much of the poet's virtue perishing in their death. We can only judge of all this vaguely and for a great part from the outside, for we cannot pretend to taste the finest flavor of the poetry which, is sealed to a foreigner in the local phrases and racy Florentine words which Giusti used; but I think posterity in Italy will stand in much the same attitude toward him that we do now. Not much of the social life of his time is preserved in his poetry, and he will not be resorted to as that satirist of the period to whom historians are fond of alluding in support of conjectures relative to society in the past. Now and then he touches upon some prevailing intellectual or literary affectation, as in the poem describing the dandified, desperate young poet of fashion, who,

Immersed in suppers and balls, A martyr in yellow gloves,

sings of Italy, of the people, of progress, with the rhetoricalities of the modern Arcadians; and he has a poem called "The Ball", which must fairly, as it certainly does wittily, represent one of those anomalous entertainments which rich foreigners give in Italy, and to which all sorts of irregular aliens resort, something of the local aristocracy appearing also in a ghostly and bewildered way. Yet even in this poem there is a political lesson.

I suppose, in fine, that I shall most interest my readers in Giusti, if I translate here the pieces that have most interested me. Of all, I like best the poem which he calls "St. Ambrose", and I think the reader will agree with me about it. It seems not only very perfect as a bit of art, with its subtly intended and apparently capricious mingling of satirical and pathetic sentiment, but valuable for its vivid expression of Italian feeling toward the Austrians. These the Italians hated as part of a stupid and brutal oppression; they despised them somewhat as a torpid-witted folk, but individually liked them for their amiability and good nature, and in their better moments they pitied them as the victims of a common tyranny. I will not be so adventurous as to say how far the beautiful military music of the Austrians tended to lighten the burden of a German garrison in an Italian city; but certainly whoever has heard that music must have felt, for one base and shameful moment, that the noise of so much of a free press as opposed his own opinions might be advantageously exchanged for it. The poem of "St. Ambrose", written in 1846, when the Germans seemed so firmly fixed in Milan, is impersonally addressed to some Italian, holding office under the Austrian government, and, therefore, in the German interest.

ST. AMBROSE.

Your Excellency is not pleased with me Because of certain jests I made of late, And, for my putting rogues in pillory, Accuse me of being anti-German. Wait, And hear a thing that happened recently: When wandering here and there one day as fate Led me, by some odd accident I ran On the old church St. Ambrose, at Milan.

My comrade of the moment was, by chance, The young son of one Sandro[1]—one of those Troublesome heads—an author of romance— Promessi Sposi—your Excellency knows The book, perhaps?—has given it a glance? Ah, no? I see! God give your brain repose; With graver interests occupied, your head To all such stuff as literature is dead.

I enter, and the church is full of troops: Of northern soldiers, of Croatians, say, And of Bohemians, standing there in groups As stiff as dry poles stuck in vineyards,—nay, As stiff as if impaled, and no one stoops Out of the plumb of soldierly array; All stand, with whiskers and mustache of tow, Before their God like spindles in a row.

I started back: I cannot well deny That being rained down, as it were, and thrust Into that herd of human cattle, I Could not suppress a feeling of disgust Unknown, I fancy, to your Excellency, By reason of your office. Pardon! I must Say the church stank of heated grease, and that The very altar-candles seemed of fat.

But when the priest had risen to devote The mystic wafer, from the band that stood About the altar came a sudden note Of sweetness over my disdainful mood; A voice that, speaking from the brazen throat Of warlike trumpets, came like the subdued Moan of a people bound in sore distress, And thinking on lost hopes and happiness.

'T was Verdi's tender chorus rose aloof,— That song the Lombards there, dying of thirst, Send up to God, "Lord, from the native roof." O'er countless thrilling hearts the song has burst, And here I, whom its magic put to proof, Beginning to be no longer I, immersed Myself amidst those tallowy fellow-men As if they had been of my land and kin.

What would your Excellency? The piece was fine, And ours, and played, too, as it should be played; It drives old grudges out when such divine Music as that mounts up into your head! But when the piece was done, back to my line I crept again, and there I should have staid, But that just then, to give me another turn, From those mole-mouths a hymn began to yearn:

A German anthem, that to heaven went On unseen wings, up from the holy fane; It was a prayer, and seemed like a lament, Of such a pensive, grave, pathetic strain That in my soul it never shall be spent; And how such heavenly harmony in the brain Of those thick-skulled barbarians should dwell I must confess it passes me to tell.

In that sad hymn, I felt the bitter sweet Of the songs heard in childhood, which the soul Learns from beloved voices, to repeat To its own anguish in the days of dole; A thought of the dear mother, a regret, A longing for repose and love,—the whole Anguish of distant exile seemed to run Over my heart and leave it all undone:

When the strain ceased, it left me pondering Tenderer thoughts and stronger and more clear; These men, I mused, the self-same despot king, Who rules in Slavic and Italian fear, Tears from their homes and arms that round them cling. And drives them slaves thence, to keep us slaves here; From their familiar fields afar they pass Like herds to winter in some strange morass.

To a hard life, to a hard discipline, Derided, solitary, dumb, they go; Blind instruments of many-eyed Rapine And purposes they share not, and scarce know; And this fell hate that makes a gulf between The Lombard and the German, aids the foe Who tramples both divided, and whose bane Is in the love and brotherhood of men.

Poor souls! far off from all that they hold dear, And in a land that hates them! Who shall say That at the bottom of their hearts they bear Love for our tyrant? I should like to lay They've our hate for him in their pockets! Here, But that I turned in haste and broke away, I should have kissed a corporal, stiff and tall, And like a scarecrow stuck against the wall.

Note [1]: Alessandro Manzoni.

I could not well praise this poem enough, without praising it too much. It depicts a whole order of things, and it brings vividly before us the scene described; while its deep feeling is so lightly and effortlessly expressed, that one does not know which to like best, the exquisite manner or the excellent sense. To prove that Giusti was really a fine poet, I need give nothing more, for this alone would imply poetic power; not perhaps of the high epic sort, but of the kind that gives far more comfort to the heart of mankind, amusing and consoling it. "Giusti composed satires, but no poems," says a French critic; but I think most will not, after reading this piece, agree with him. There are satires and satires, and some are fierce enough and brutal enough; but when a satire can breathe so much tenderness, such generous humanity, such pity for the means, at the same time with such hatred of the source of wrong, and all with an air of such smiling pathos, I say, if it is not poetry, it is something better, and by all means let us have it instead of poetry. It is humor, in its best sense; and, after religion, there is nothing in the world can make men so conscious, thoughtful, and modest.

A certain pensiveness very perceptible in "St. Ambrose" is the prevailing sentiment of another poem of Giusti's, which I like very much, because it is more intelligible than his political satires, and because it places the reader in immediate sympathy with a man who had not only the subtlety to depict the faults of the time, but the sad wisdom to know that he was no better himself merely for seeing them. The poem was written in 1844, and addressed to Gino Capponi, the life-long friend in whose house Giusti died, and the descendant of the great Gino Capponi who threatened the threatening Frenchmen when Charles VIII occupied Florence: "If you sound your trumpets," as a call to arms against the Florentines, "we will ring our bells," he said.

Giusti speaks of the part which he bears as a spectator and critic of passing events, and then apostrophizes himself:

Who art thou that a scourge so keen dost bear And pitilessly dost the truth proclaim, And that so loath of praise for good and fair, So eager art with bitter songs of blame? Hast thou achieved, in thine ideal's pursuit, The secret and the ministry of art? Did'st thou seek first to kill and to uproot All pride and folly out of thine own heart Ere turning to teach other men their part?

* * * * *

O wretched scorn! from which alone I sing, Thou weariest and saddenest my soul! O butterfly that joyest on thy wing, Pausing from bloom to bloom, without a goal— And thou, that singing of love for evermore, Fond nightingale! from wood to wood dost go, My life is as a never-ending war Of doubts, when likened to the peace ye know, And wears what seems a smile and is a throe!

There is another famous poem of Giusti's in quite a different mood. It is called "Instructions to an Emissary", sent down into Italy to excite a revolution, and give Austria a pretext for interference, and the supposed speaker is an Austrian minister. It is done with excellent sarcasm, and it is useful as light upon a state of things which, whether it existed wholly in fact or partly in the suspicion of the Italians, is equally interesting and curious. The poem was written in 1847, when the Italians were everywhere aspiring to a national independence and self-government, and their rulers were conceding privileges while secretly leaguing with Austria to continue the old order of an Italy divided among many small tyrants. The reader will readily believe that my English is not as good as the Italian.

INSTRUCTIONS TO AN EMISSARY.

You will go into Italy; you have here Your passport and your letters of exchange; You travel as a count, it would appear, Going for pleasure and a little change; Once there, you play the rodomont, the queer Crack-brain good fellow, idle gamester, strange Spendthrift and madcap. Give yourself full swing; People are taken with that kind of thing.

When you behold—and it will happen so— The birds flock down about the net, be wary; Talk from a warm and open heart, and show Yourself with everybody bold and merry. The North's a dungeon, say, a waste of snow, The very house and home of January, Compared with that fair garden of the earth, Beautiful, free, and full of life and mirth.

And throwing in your discourse this word free, Just to fill up, and as by accident, Look round among your listeners, and see If it has had at all the effect you meant; Beat a retreat if it fails, carelessly Talking of this and that; but in the event Some one is taken with it, never fear, Push boldly forward, for the road is clear.

Be bold and shrewd; and do not be too quick, As some are, and plunge headlong on your prey When, if the snare shall happen not to stick, Your uproar frightens all the rest away; To take your hare by carriage is the trick; Make a wide circle, do not mind delay; Experiment and work in silence; scheme With that wise prudence that shall folly seem.

The minister bids the emissary, "Turn me into a jest; say I'm sleepy and begin to dote; invent what lies you will, I give you carte-bianche."

Of governments down yonder say this, too, At the cafes and theaters; indeed For this, I've made a little sign for you Upon your passport that the wise will read For an express command to let you do Whatever you think best, and take no heed.

Then the emissary is instructed to make himself center of the party of extremes, and in different companies to pity the country, to laugh at moderate progress as a sham, and to say that the concessions of the local governments are merely ruses to pacify and delude the people,—as in great part they were, though Giusti and his party did not believe so. The instructions to the emissary conclude with the charge to

Scatter republican ideas, and say That all the rich and all the well-to-do Use common people hardly better, nay, Worse, than their dogs; and add some hard words, too: Declare that bread's the question of the day, And that the communists alone are true; And that the foes of the agrarian cause Waste more than half of all by wicked laws.

Then, he tells him, when the storm begins to blow, and the pockets of the people feel its effect, and the mob grows hungry, to contrive that there shall be some sort of outbreak, with a bit of pillage,—

So that the kings down there, pushed to the wall, For congresses and bayonets shall call.

If you should have occasion to spend, spend, The money won't be wasted; there must be Policemen in retirement, spies without end, Shameless and penniless; buy, you are free. If destiny should be so much your friend That you could shake a throne or two for me, Pour me out treasures. I shall be content; My gains will be at least seven cent, per cent.

Or, in the event the inconstant goddess frown, Let me know instantly when you are caught; A thunderbolt shall burst upon your crown, And you become a martyr on the spot. As minister I turn all upside down, Our government disowns you as it ought. And so the cake is turned upon the fire, And we can use you next as we desire.

In order not to awaken any fear In the post-office, 't is my plan that you Shall always correspond with liberals here; Don't doubt but I shall hear of all you do. ...'s a Republican known far and near; I haven't another spy that's half as true! You understand, and I need say no more; Lucky for you if you get me up a war!

We get the flavor of this, at least the literary flavor, the satire, and the irony, but it inevitably falls somewhat cold upon us, because it had its origin in a condition of things which, though historical, are so opposed to all our own experience that they are hard to be imagined. Yet we can fancy the effect such a poem must have had, at the time when it was written, upon a people who felt in the midst of their aspirations some disturbing element from without, and believed this to be espionage and Austrian interference. If the poem had also to be passed about secretly from one hand to another, its enjoyment must have been still keener; but strip it of all these costly and melancholy advantages, and it is still a piece of subtle and polished satire.

Most of Giusti's poems, however, are written in moods and manners very different from this; there is sparkle and dash in the movement, as well as the thought, which I cannot reproduce, and in giving another poem I can only hope to show something of his varying manner. Some foreigner, Lamartine, I think, called Italy the Land of the Dead,—whereupon Giusti responded with a poem of that title, addressed to his friend Gino Capponi:

THE LAND OF THE DEAD.

'Mongst us phantoms of Italians,— Mummies even from our birth,— The very babies' nurses Help to put them under earth.

'T is a waste of holy water When we're taken to the font: They that make us pay for burial Swindle us to that amount.

In appearance we're constructed Much like Adam's other sons,— Seem of flesh and blood, but really We are nothing but dry bones.

O deluded apparitions, What do you do among men? Be resigned to fate, and vanish Back into the past again!

Ah! of a perished people What boots now the brilliant story? Why should skeletons be bothering About liberty and glory?

Why deck this funeral service With such pomp of torch and flower? Let us, without more palaver, Growl this requiem, of ours.

And so the poet recounts the Italian names distinguished in modern literature, and describes the intellectual activity that prevails in this Land of the Dead. Then he turns to the innumerable visitors of Italy:

O you people hailed down on us From the living, overhead, With what face can you confront us, Seeking health among us dead?

Soon or late this pestilential Clime shall work you harm—beware! Even you shall likewise find it Foul and poisonous grave-yard air.

O ye grim, sepulchral friars Ye inquisitorial ghouls, Lay down, lay down forever, The ignorant censor's tools.

This wretched gift of thinking, O ye donkeys, is your doom; Do you care to expurgate us, Positively, in the tomb?

Why plant this bayonet forest On our sepulchers? what dread Causes you to place such jealous Custody upon the dead?

Well, the mighty book of Nature Chapter first and last must have; Yours is now the light of heaven, Ours the darkness of the grave.

But, then, if you ask it, We lived greatly in our turn; We were grand and glorious, Gino, Ere our friends up there were born!

O majestic mausoleums, City walls outworn with time, To our eyes are even your ruins Apotheosis sublime!

O barbarian unquiet Raze each storied sepulcher! With their memories and their beauty All the lifeless ashes stir.

O'er these monuments in vigil Cloudless the sun flames and glows In the wind for funeral torches,— And the violet, and the rose,

And the grape, the fig, the olive, Are the emblems fit of grieving; 'T is, in fact, a cemetery To strike envy in the living.

Well, in fine, O brother corpses, Let them pipe on as they like; Let us see on whom hereafter Such a death as ours shall strike!

'Mongst the anthems of the function Is not Dies Irae? Nay, In all the days to come yet, Shall there be no Judgment Day?

In a vein of like irony, the greater part of Giusti's political poems are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the tang of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and originality—and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet—it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by these words and phrases the frankness and fineness of dialect.

But Giusti had so much gentleness, sweetness, and meekness in his heart, that I do not like to leave the impression of him as a satirist last upon the reader. Rather let me close these meager notices with the beautiful little poem, said to be the last he wrote, as he passed his days in the slow death of the consumptive. It is called

A PRAYER.

For the spirit confused With misgiving and with sorrow, Let me, my Saviour, borrow The light of faith from thee. O lift from it the burden That bows it down before thee. With sighs and with weeping I commend myself to thee; My faded life, thou knowest, Little by little is wasted Like wax before the fire, Like snow-wreaths in the sun. And for the soul that panteth For its refuge in thy bosom, Break, thou, the ties, my Saviour, That hinder it from thee.



FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARO

I

In the month of March, 1848, news came to Rome of the insurrection in Vienna, and a multitude of the citizens assembled to bear the tidings to the Austrian Ambassador, who resided in the ancient palace of the Venetian Republic. The throng swept down the Corso, gathering numbers as it went, and paused in the open space before the Palazzo di Venezia. At its summons, the ambassador abandoned his quarters, and fled without waiting to hear the details of the intelligence from Vienna. The people, incited by a number of Venetian exiles, tore down the double-headed eagle from the portal, and carried it for a more solemn and impressive destruction to the Piazza del Popolo, while a young poet erased the inscription asserting the Austrian claim to the palace, and wrote in its stead the words, "Palazzo della Dieta Italiana."

The sentiment of national unity expressed in this legend had been the ruling motive of the young poet Francesco Dall' Ongaro's life, and had already made his name famous through the patriotic songs that were sung all over Italy. Garibaldi had chanted one of his Stornelli when embarking from Montevideo in the spring of 1848 to take part in the Italian revolutions, of which these little ballads had become the rallying-cries; and if the voice of the people is in fact inspired, this poet could certainly have claimed the poet's long-lost honors of prophecy, for it was he who had shaped their utterance. He had ceased to assume any other sacred authority, though educated a priest, and at the time when he devoted the Palazzo di Venezia to the idea of united Italy, there was probably no person in Rome less sacerdotal than he.

Francesco Dall' Ongaro was born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice, and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the Titians and Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to more than one of my readers to behold many little sedate old men in their teens, lounging up and down the cool, humid courts there, and trailing their black priestly robes over the springing mold. The sun seldom strikes into that sad close, and when the boys form into long files, two by two, and march out for recreation, they have a torpid and melancholy aspect, upon which the daylight seems to smile in vain. They march solemnly up the long Zattere, with a pale young father at their head, and then march solemnly back again, sweet, genteel, pathetic specters of childhood, and reenter their common tomb, doubtless unenvied by the hungriest and raggedest street boy, who asks charity of them as they pass, and hoarsely whispers "Raven!" when their leader is beyond hearing. There is no reason to suppose that a boy, born poet among the mountains, and full of the wild and free romance of his native scenes, could love the life led at the Seminary of the Salute, even though it included the study of literature and philosophy. From his childhood Dall' Ongaro had given proofs of his poetic gift, and the reverend ravens of the seminary were unconsciously hatching a bird as little like themselves as might be. Nevertheless, Dall' Ongaro left their school to enter the University of Padua as student of theology, and after graduating took orders, and went to Este, where he lived some time as teacher of belles-lettres.

At Este his life was without scope, and he was restless and unhappy, full of ardent and patriotic impulses, and doubly restricted by his narrow field and his priestly vocation. In no long time he had trouble with the Bishop of Padua, and, abandoning Este, seems also to have abandoned the Church forever. The chief fruit of his sojourn in that quaint and ancient village was a poem entitled II Venerdi Santo, in which he celebrated some incidents of the life of Lord Byron, somewhat as Byron would have done. Dall' Ongaro's poems, however, confess the influence of the English poet less than those of other modern Italians, whom Byron infected so much more than his own nation.

From Este, Dall' Ongaro went to Trieste, where he taught literature and philosophy, wrote for the theater, and established a journal in which, for ten years, he labored to educate the people in his ideas of Italian unity and progress. That these did not coincide with the ideas of most Italian dreamers and politicians of the time may be inferred from the fact that he began in 1846 a course of lectures on Dante, in which he combated the clerical tendencies of Gioberti and Balbo, and criticised the first acts of Pius IX. He had as profound doubt of Papal liberality as Niccolini, at a time when other patriots were fondly cherishing the hope of a united Italy under an Italian pontiff; and at Rome, two years later, he sought to direct popular feeling from the man to the end, in one of the earliest of his graceful Stornelli.

PIO NONO.

Pio Nono is a name, and not the man Who saws the air from yonder Bishop's seat; Pio Nono is the offspring of our brain, The idol of our hearts, a vision sweet; Pio Nono is a banner, a refrain, A name that sounds well sung upon the street.

Who calls, "Long live Pio Nono!" means to call, Long live our country, and good-will to all! And country and good-will, these signify That it is well for Italy to die; But not to die for a vain dream or hope, Not to die for a throne and for a Pope!

During these years at Trieste, however, Dall' Ongaro seems to have been also much occupied with pure literature, and to have given a great deal of study to the sources of national poetry, as he discovered them in the popular life and legends. He had been touched with the prevailing romanticism; he had written hymns like Manzoni, and, like Carrer, he sought to poetize the traditions and superstitions of his countrymen. He found a richer and deeper vein than the Venetian poet among his native hills and the neighboring mountains of Slavonia, but I cannot say that he wrought it to much better effect. The two volumes which he published in 1840 contain many ballads which are very graceful and musical, but which lack the fresh spirit of songs springing from the popular heart, while they also want the airy and delicate beauty of the modern German ballads. Among the best of them are two which Dall' Ongaro built up from mere lines and fragments of lines current among the people, as in later years he more successfully restored us two plays of Menander from the plots and a dozen verses of each. "One may imitate," he says, "more or less fortunately, Manzoni, Byron, or any other poet, but not the simple inspirations of the people. And 'The Pilgrim who comes from Rome,' and the 'Rosettina,' if one could have them complete as they once were, would probably make me blush for my elaborate variations." But study which was so well directed, and yet so conscious of its limitations, could not but be of great value; and Dall' Ongaro, no doubt, owed to it his gift of speaking so authentically for the popular heart. That which he did later showed that he studied the people's thought and expression con amore, and in no vain sentiment of dilettanteism, or antiquarian research, or literary patronage.

It is not to be supposed that Dall' Ongaro's literary life had at this period an altogether objective tendency. In the volumes mentioned, there is abundant evidence that he was of the same humor as all men of poetic feeling must be at a certain time of life. Here are pretty verses of occasion, upon weddings and betrothals, such as people write in Italy; here are stanzas from albums, such as people used to write everywhere; here are didactic lines; here are bursts of mere sentiment and emotion. In the volume of Fantasie, published at Florence in 1866, Dall' Ongaro collected some of the ballads from his early works, but left out the more subjective effusions.

I give one of these in which, under a fantastic name and in a fantastic form, the poet expresses the tragic and pathetic interest of the life to which he was himself vowed.

THE SISTER OF THE MOON.

Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy pensive light Be faithful unto me: I have a sister in the lonely night When I commune with thee.

Alone and friendless in the world am I, Sorrow's forgotten maid, Like some poor dove abandoned to die By her first love unwed.

Like some poor floweret in a desert land I pass my days alone; In vain upon the air its leaves expand, In vain its sweets are blown.

No loving hand shall save it from the waste, And wear the lonely thing; My heart shall throb upon no loving breast In my neglected spring.

That trouble which consumes my weary soul No cunning can relieve, No wisdom understand the secret dole Of the sad sighs I heave.

My fond heart cherished once a hope, a vow, The leaf of autumn gales! In convent gloom, a dim lamp burning low, My spirit lacks and fails.

I shall have prayers and hymns like some dead saint Painted upon a shrine, But in love's blessed power to fall and faint, It never shall be mine.

Born to entwine my life with others, born To love and to be wed, Apart from all I lead my life forlorn, Sorrow's forgotten maid.

Shine, moon, ah shine! and let thy tender light Be faithful unto me: Speak to me of the life beyond the night I shall enjoy with thee.

II

It will here satisfy the strongest love of contrasts to turn from Dall' Ongaro the sentimental poet to Dall' Ongaro the politician, and find him on his feet and making a speech at a public dinner given to Richard Cobden at Trieste, in 1847. Cobden was then, as always, the advocate of free trade, and Dall' Ongaro was then, as always, the advocate of free government. He saw in the union of the Italians under a customs-bond the hope of their political union, and in their emancipation from oppressive imposts their final escape from yet more galling oppression. He expressed something of this, and, though repeatedly interrupted by the police, he succeeded in saying so much as to secure his expulsion from Trieste.

Italy was already in a ferment, and insurrections were preparing in Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome; and Dall' Ongaro, consulting with the Venetian leaders Manin and Tommaseo, retired to Tuscany, and took part in the movements which wrung a constitution from the Grand Duke, and preceded the flight of that prince. In December he went to Rome, where he joined himself with the Venetian refugees and with other Italian patriots, like D'Azeglio and Durando, who were striving to direct the popular mind toward Italian unity. The following March he was, as we have seen, one of the exiles who led the people against the Palazzodi Venezia. In the mean time the insurrection of the glorious Five Days had taken place at Milan, and the Lombard cities, rising one after another, had driven out the Austrian garrisons. Dall' Ongaro went from Rome to Milan, and thence, by advice of the revolutionary leaders, to animate the defense against the Austrians in Friuli; one of his brothers was killed at Palmanuova, and another severely wounded. Treviso, whither he had retired, falling into the hands of the Germans, he went to Venice, then a republic under the presidency of Manin; and here he established a popular journal, which opposed the union of the struggling republic with Piedmont under Carlo Alberto. Dall' Ongaro was finally expelled and passed next to Ravenna, where he found Garibaldi, who had been banished by the Roman government, and was in doubt as to how he might employ his sword on behalf of his country. In those days the Pope's moderately liberal minister, Rossi, was stabbed, and Count Pompeo Campello, an old literary friend and acquaintance of Dall' Ongaro, was appointed minister of war. With Garibaldi's consent the poet went to Rome, and used his influence to such effect that Garibaldi was authorized to raise a legion of volunteers, and was appointed general of those forces which took so glorious a part in the cause of Italian Independence. Soon after, when the Pope fled to Gaeta, and the Republic was proclaimed, Dall' Ongaro and Garibaldi were chosen representatives of the people. Then followed events of which it is still a pang keen to read: the troops of the French Republic marched upon Rome, and, after a defense more splendid and heroic than any victory, the city fell. The Pope returned, and all who loved Italy and freedom turned in exile from Rome. The cities of the Romagna, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venetia had fallen again under the Pope, the Grand Duke, and the Austrians, and Dall' Ongaro took refuge in Switzerland.



Without presuming to say whether Dall' Ongaro was mistaken in his political ideas, we may safely admit that he was no wiser a politician than Dante or Petrarch. He was an anti-Papist, as these were, and like these he opposed an Italy of little principalities and little republics. But his dream, unlike theirs, was of a great Italian democracy, and in 1848-49 he opposed the union of the Italian patriots under Carlo Alberto, because this would have tended to the monarchy.

III

But it is not so much with Dall' Ongaro's political opinions that we have to do as with his poetry of the revolutionary period of 1848, as we find in it the little collection of lyrics which he calls "Stornelli." These commemorate nearly all the interesting aspects of that epoch; and in their wit and enthusiasm and aspiration, we feel the spirit of a race at once the most intellectual and the most emotional in the world, whose poets write as passionately of politics as of love. Arnaud awards Dall' Ongaro the highest praise, and declares him "the first to formulate in the common language of Italy patriotic songs which, current on the tongues of the people, should also remain the patrimony of the national literature.... In his popular songs," continues this critic, "Dall' Ongaro has given all that constitutes true, good, and—not the least merit—novel poetry. Meter and rhythm second the expression, imbue the thought with harmony, and develop its symmetry.... How enviable is that perspicuity which does not oblige you to re-read a single line to evolve therefrom the latent idea!" And we shall have no less to admire the perfect art which, never passing the intelligence of the people, is never ignoble in sentiment or idea, but always as refined as it is natural.

I do not know how I could better approach our poet than by first offering this lyric, written when, in 1847, the people of Leghorn rose in arms to repel a threatened invasion of the Austrians.

THE WOMAN OF LEGHORN.

Adieu, Livorno! adieu, paternal walls! Perchance I never shall behold you more! On father's and mother's grave the shadow falls. My love has gone under our flag to war; And I will follow him where fortune calls; I have had a rifle in my hands before.

The ball intended for my lover's breast, Before he knows it my heart shall arrest; And over his dead comrade's visage he Shall pitying stoop, and look whom it can be. Then he shall see and know that it is I: Poor boy! how bitterly my love will cry!

The Italian editor of the "Stornelli" does not give the closing lines too great praise when he declares that "they say more than all the lament of Tancred over Clorinda." In this little flight of song, we pass over more tragedy than Messer Torquato could have dreamed in the conquest of many Jerusalems; for, after all, there is nothing so tragic as fact. The poem is full at once of the grand national impulse, and of purely personal and tender devotion; and that fluttering, vehement purpose, thrilling and faltering in alternate lines, and breaking into a sob at last, is in every syllable the utterance of a woman's spirit and a woman's nature.

Quite as womanly, though entirely different, is this lament, which the poet attributes to his sister for their brother, who fell at Palmanuova, May 14, 1848.

THE SISTER.

(Palma, May 14, 1848.)

And he, my brother, to the fort had gone, And the grenade, it struck him in the breast; He fought for liberty, and death he won, For country here, and found in heaven rest.

And now only to follow him I sigh; A new desire has taken me to die,— To follow him where is no enemy, Where every one lives happy and is free.

All hope and purpose are gone from this woman's heart, for whom Italy died in her brother, and who has only these artless, half-bewildered words of regret to speak, and speaks them as if to some tender and sympathetic friend acquainted with all the history going before their abrupt beginning. I think it most pathetic and natural, also, that even in her grief and her aspiration for heaven, her words should have the tint of her time, and she should count freedom among the joys of eternity.

Quite as womanly again, and quite as different once more, is the lyric which the reader will better appreciate when I remind him how the Austrians massacred the unarmed people in Milan, in January, 1848, and how, later, during the Five Days, they murdered their Italian prisoners, sparing neither sex nor age.[1]

Note [1]: "Many foreigners," says Emilie Dandolo, in his restrained and temperate history of "I Volontarii e Bersaglieri Lombardi", "have cast a doubt upon the incredible ferocity of the Austrians during the Five Days, and especially before evacuating the city. But, alas! the witnesses are too many to be doubted. A Croat was seen carrying a babe transfixed upon his bayonet. All know of those women's hands and ears found in the haversacks of the prisoners; of those twelve unhappy men burnt alive at Porta Tosa; of those nineteen buried in a lime-pit at the Castello, whose scorched bodies we found. I myself, ordered with a detachment, after the departure of the enemy, to examine the Castello and neighborhood, was horror-struck at the sight of a babe nailed to a post."

THE LOMBARD WOMAN.

(Milan, January, 1848.)

Here, take these gaudy robes and put them by; I will go dress me black as widowhood; I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry Of him that struck and him that vainly sued. Henceforth no other ornament will I But on my breast a ribbon red as blood.

And when they ask what dyed the silk so red, I'll say, The life-blood of my brothers dead. And when they ask how it may cleansed be, I'll say, O, not in river nor in sea; Dishonor passes not in wave nor flood; My ribbon ye must wash in German blood.

The repressed horror in the lines,

I have seen blood run, I have heard the cry Of him that struck and him that vainly sued,

is the sentiment of a picture that presents the scene to the reader's eye as this shuddering woman saw it; and the heart of woman's fierceness and hate is in that fragment of drama with which the brief poem closes. It is the history of an epoch. That epoch is now past, however; so long and so irrevocably past, that Dall' Ongaro commented in a note upon the poem: "The word 'German' is left as a key to the opinions of the time. Human brotherhood has been greatly promoted since 1848. German is now no longer synonymous with enemy. Italy has made peace with the peoples, and is leagued with them all against their common oppressors."

There is still another of these songs, in which the heart of womanhood speaks, though this time with a voice of pride and happiness.

THE DECORATION.

My love looks well under his helmet's crest; He went to war, and did not let them see His back, and so his wound is in the breast: For one he got, he struck and gave them three. When he came back, I loved him, hurt so, best; He married me and loves me tenderly.

When he goes by, and people give him way, I thank God for my fortune every day; When he goes by he seems more grand and fair Than any crossed and ribboned cavalier: The cavalier grew up with his cross on, And I know how my darling's cross was won!

This poem, like that of La Livornese and La Donna Lombarda, is a vivid picture: it is a liberated city, and the streets are filled with jubilant people; the first victorious combats have taken place, and it is a wounded hero who passes with his ribbon on his breast. As the fond crowd gives way to him, his young wife looks on him from her window with an exultant love, unshadowed by any possibility of harm:

Mi meno a moglie e mi vuol tanto bene!

This is country and freedom to her,—this is strength which despots cannot break,—this is joy to which defeat and ruin can never come nigh! It might be any one of the sarcastic and quickwitted people talking politics in the streets of Rome in 1847, who sees the newly elected Senator—the head of the Roman municipality, and the legitimate mediator between Pope and people—as he passes, and speaks to him in these lines the dominant feeling of the moment:

THE CARDINALS.

O Senator of Rome! if true and well You are reckoned honest, in the Vatican, Let it be yours His Holiness to tell, There are many Cardinals, and not one man.

They are made like lobsters, and, when they are dead, Like lobsters change their colors and turn red; And while they are living, with their backward gait Displace and tangle good Saint Peter's net.

An impulse of the time is strong again in the following Stornello,—a cry of reproach that seems to follow some recreant from a beleaguered camp of true comrades, and to utter the feeling of men who marched to battle through defection, and were strong chiefly in their just cause. It bears the date of that fatal hour when the king of Naples, after a brief show of liberality, recalled his troops from Bologna, where they had been acting against Austria with the confederated forces of the other Italian states, and when every man lost to Italy was as an ebbing drop of her life's blood.

THE DESERTER.

(Bologna, May, 1818.)

Never did grain grow out of frozen earth; From the dead branch never did blossom start: If thou lovest not the land that gave thee birth, Within thy breast thou bear'st a frozen heart; If thou lovest not this land of ancient worth, To love aught else, say, traitor, how thou art!

To thine own land thou could'st not faithful be,— Woe to the woman that puts faith in thee! To him that trusteth in the recreant, woe! Never from frozen earth did harvest grow: To her that trusteth a deserter, shame! Out of the dead branch never blossom came.

And this song, so fine in its picturesque and its dramatic qualities, is not less true to the hope of the Venetians when they rose in 1848, and intrusted their destinies to Daniele Manin.

THE RING OF THE LAST DOGE.

I saw the widowed Lady of the Sea Crowned with corals and sea-weed and shells, Who her long anguish and adversity Had seemed to drown in plays and festivals.

I said: "Where is thine ancient fealty fled?— Where is the ring with which Manin did wed His bride?" With tearful visage she: "An eagle with two beaks tore it from me. Suddenly I arose, and how it came I know not, but I heard my bridegroom's name." Poor widow! 't is not he. Yet he may bring— Who knows?—back to the bride her long-lost ring.

The Venetians of that day dreamed that San Marco might live again, and the fineness and significance of the poem could not have been lost on the humblest in Venice, where all were quick to beauty and vividly remembered that the last Doge who wedded the sea was named, like the new President, Manin.

I think the Stornelli of the revolutionary period of 1848 have a peculiar value, because they embody, in forms of artistic perfection, the evanescent as well as the enduring qualities of popular feeling. They give us what had otherwise been lost, in the passing humor of the time. They do not celebrate the battles or the great political occurrences. If they deal with events at all, is it with events that express some belief or longing,—rather with what people hoped or dreamed than with what they did. They sing the Friulan volunteers, who bore the laurel instead of the olive during Holy Week, in token that the patriotic war had become a religion; they remind us that the first fruits of Italian longing for unity were the cannons sent to the Romans by the Genoese; they tell us that the tricolor was placed in the hand of the statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitol, to signify that Rome was no more, and that Italy was to be. But the Stornelli touch with most effect those yet more intimate ties between national and individual life that vibrate in the hearts of the Livornese and the Lombard woman, of the lover who sees his bride in the patriotic colors, of the maiden who will be a sister of charity that she may follow her lover through all perils, of the mother who names her new-born babe Costanza in the very hour of the Venetian republic's fall. And I like the Stornelli all the better because they preserve the generous ardor of the time, even in its fondness and excess.

After the fall of Rome, the poet did not long remain unmolested even in his Swiss retreat. In 1852 the Federal Council yielded to the instances of the Austrian government, and expelled Dall' Ongaro from the Republic. He retired with his sister and nephew to Brussels, where he resumed the lectures upon Dante, interrupted by his exile from Trieste in 1847, and thus supported his family. Three years later he gained permission to enter France, and up to the spring-time of 1859 he remained in Paris, busying himself with literature, and watching events with all an exile's eagerness. The war with Austria broke out, and the poet seized the long-coveted opportunity to return to Italy, whither he went as the correspondent of a French newspaper. On the conclusion of peace at Villafranca, this journal changed its tone, and being no longer in sympathy with Dall' Ongaro's opinions, he left it. Baron Ricasoli, to induce him to make Tuscany his home, instituted a chair of comparative dramatic literature in connection with the University of Pisa, and offered it to Dall' Ongaro, whose wide general learning and special dramatic studies peculiarly qualified him to hold it. He therefore took up his abode at Florence, dedicating his main industry to a comparative course of ancient and modern dramatic literature, and writing his wonderful restorations of Menander's "Phasma" and "Treasure". He was well known to the local American and English Society, and was mourned by many friends when he died there, some ten years ago.

As with Dall' Ongaro literature had always been but an instrument for the redemption of Italy, even after his appointment to a university professorship he did not forget this prime object. In nearly all that he afterwards wrote, he kept the great aim of his life in view, and few of the events or hopes of that dreary period of suspense and abortive effort between the conclusion of peace at Villafranca and the acquisition of Venice went unsung by him. Indeed, some of his most characteristic "Stornelli" belong to this epoch. After Savoy and Nice had been betrayed to France, and while the Italians waited in angry suspicion for the next demand of their hated ally, which might be the surrender of the island of Sardinia or the sacrifice of the Genoese province, but which no one could guess in the impervious Napoleonic silence, our poet wrote:

THE IMPERIAL EGG.

(Milan, 1862.)

Who knows what hidden devil it may be Under yon mute, grim bird that looks our way?— Yon silent bird of evil omen,—he That, wanting peace, breathes discord and dismay. Quick, quick, and change his egg, my Italy, Before there hatch from it some bird of prey,—

Before some beak of rapine be set free, That, after the mountains, shall infest the sea; Before some ravenous eaglet shall be sent After our isles to gorge the continent. I'd rather a goose even from yon egg should come,— If only of the breed that once saved Rome!

The flight of the Grand Duke from Florence in 1859, and his conciliatory address to his late subjects after Villafranca, in which by fair promises he hoped to win them back to their allegiance; the union of Tuscany with the kingdom of Italy; the removal of the Austrian flags from Milan; Garibaldi's crusade in Sicily; the movement upon Rome in 1862; Aspromonte,—all these events, with the shifting phases of public feeling throughout that time, the alternate hopes and fears of the Italian nation, are celebrated in the later Stornelli of Dall' Ongaro. Venice has long since fallen to Italy; and Rome has become the capital of the nation. But the unification was not accomplished till Garibaldi, who had done so much for Italy, had been wounded by her king's troops in his impatient attempt to expel the French at Aspromonte.

TO MY SONGS.

Fly, O my songs, to Varignano, fly! Like some lost flock of swallows homeward flying, And hail me Rome's Dictator, who there doth lie Broken with wounds, but conquered not, nor dying; Bid him think on the April that is nigh, Month of the flowers and ventures fear-defying.

Or if it is not nigh, it soon shall come, As shall the swallow to his last year's home, As on its naked stem the rose shall burn, As to the empty sky the stars return, As hope comes back to hearts crushed by regret;— Nay, say not this to his heart ne'er crushed yet!

Let us conclude these notices with one of the Stornelli which is non-political, but which I think we won't find the less agreeable for that reason. I like it because it says a pretty thing or two very daintily, and is interfused with a certain arch and playful spirit which is not so common but we ought to be glad to recognize it.

If you are good as you are fair, indeed, Keep to yourself those sweet eyes, I implore! A little flame burns under either lid That might in old age kindle youth once more: I am like a hermit in his cavern hid, But can I look on you and not adore?

Fair, if you do not mean my misery Those lovely eyes lift upward to the sky; I shall believe you some saint shrined above, And may adore you if I may not love; I shall believe you some bright soul in bliss, And may look on you and not look amiss.

I have already noted the more obvious merits of the Stornelli, and I need not greatly insist upon them. Their defects are equally plain; one sees that their simplicity all but ceases to be a virtue at times, and that at times their feeling is too much intellectualized. Yet for all this we must recognize their excellence, and the skill as well as the truth of the poet. It is very notable with what directness he expresses his thought, and with what discretion he leaves it when expressed. The form is always most graceful, and the success with which dramatic, picturesque, and didactic qualities are blent, for a sole effect, in the brief compass of the poems, is not too highly praised in the epithet of novelty. Nothing is lost for the sake of attitude; the actor is absent from the most dramatic touches, the painter is not visible in lines which are each a picture, the teacher does not appear for the purpose of enforcing the moral. It is not the grandest poetry, but is true feeling, admirable art.



GIOVANNI PRATI

I

The Italian poet who most resembles in theme and treatment the German romanticists of the second period was nearest them geographically in his origin. Giovanni Prati was born at Dasindo, a mountain village of the Trentino, and his boyhood was passed amidst the wild scenes of that picturesque region, whose dark valleys and snowy, cloud-capped heights, foaming torrents and rolling mists, lend their gloom and splendor to so much of his verse. His family was poor, but it was noble, and he received, through whatever sacrifice of those who remained at home, the education of a gentleman, as the Italians understand it. He went to school in Trent, and won some early laurels by his Latin poems, which the good priests who kept the collegio gathered and piously preserved in an album for the admiration and emulation of future scholars; when in due time he matriculated at the University of Padua as student of law, he again shone as a poet, and there he wrote his "Edmenegarda", a poem that gave him instant popularity throughout Italy. When he quitted the university he visited different parts of the country, "having the need" of frequent change of scenes and impressions; but everywhere he poured out songs, ballads, and romances, and was already a voluminous poet in 1840, when, in his thirtieth year, he began to abandon his Teutonic phantoms and hectic maidens, and to make Italy in various disguises the heroine of his song. Whether Austria penetrated these disguises or not, he was a little later ordered to leave Milan. He took refuge in Piedmont, whose brave king, in spite of diplomatic remonstrances from his neighbors, made Prati his poeta cesareo, or poet laureate. This was in 1843; and five years later he took an active part in inciting with his verse the patriotic revolts which broke out all over Italy. But he was supposed by virtue of his office to be monarchical in his sympathies, and when he ventured to Florence, the novelist Guerrezzi, who was at the head of the revolutionary government there, sent the poet back across the border in charge of a carbineer. In 1851 he had the misfortune to write a poem in censure of Orsini's attempt upon the life of Napoleon III., and to take money for it from the gratified emperor. He seems to have remained up to his death in the enjoyment of his office at Turin. His latest poem, if one may venture to speak of any as the last among poems poured out with such bewildering rapidity, was "Satan and the Graces", which De Sanctis made himself very merry over.

The Edmenegarda, which first won him repute, was perhaps not more youthful, but it was a subject that appealed peculiarly to the heart of youth, and was sufficiently mawkish. All the characters of the Edmenegarda were living at the time of its publication, and were instantly recognized; yet there seems to have been no complaint against the poet on their part, nor any reproach on the part of criticism. Indeed, at least one of the characters was nattered by the celebrity given him. "So great," says Prati's biographer, in the Galleria Nazionale, "was the enthusiasm awakened everywhere, and in every heart, by the Edmenegarda, that the young man portrayed in it, under the name of Leoni, imagining himself to have become, through Prati's merit, an eminently poetical subject, presented himself to the poet in the Caffe Pedrocchi at Padua, and returned him his warmest thanks. Prati also made the acquaintance, at the Caffe Nazionale in Turin, of his Edmenegarda, but after the wrinkles had seamed the visage of his ideal, and canceled perhaps from her soul the memory of anguish suffered." If we are to believe this writer, the story of a wife's betrayal, abandonment by her lover, and repudiation by her husband, produced effects upon the Italian public as various as profound. "In this pathetic story of an unhappy love was found so much truth of passion, so much naturalness of sentiment, and so much power, that every sad heart was filled with love for the young poet, so compassionate toward innocent misfortune, so sympathetic in form, in thought, in sentiment. Prom that moment Prati became the poet of suffering youth; in every corner of Italy the tender verses of the Edmenegarda were read with love, and sometimes frenzied passion; the political prisoners of Rome, of Naples, and Palermo found them a grateful solace amid the privations and heavy tedium of incarceration; many sundered lovers were reconjoined indissolubly in the kiss of peace; more than one desperate girl was restrained from the folly of suicide; and even the students in the ecclesiastical seminaries at Milan revolted, as it were, against their rector, and petitioned the Archbishop of Gaisruk that they might be permitted to read the fantastic romance."