Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/379

Rh devoid of inventive power: the wandering shepherd of Asia, mouthpiece for one of his finest poems, is the author in everything but costume. Three of the most celebrated odes. To Italy, On the Florentine Monument to Dante, and To Angelo Mai on the Recovery of Cicero De Republica, may be styled patriotic; but although the love of Italy is clearly and eloquently expressed, the scorn of her actual condition, the fault of no one then breathing, is so bitter and contumelious that the effect is anything but Tyrtæan. These are nevertheless masterpieces of noble diction, and little short of miraculous for the age of twenty, at which they were produced. It is perhaps a defect that lines are frequently left unrhymed, and that the ear is thus defrauded of an anticipated satisfaction.

Leopardi's blank verse is the finest in Italian literature. If it has neither the "wood-note wild" of Shakespeare's sweetest passages, nor the voluminous harmony of Milton's organ-music, nor the dainty artifice of Tennyson, it is fully on a par with the finest metrical performances of Shelley and Coleridge; and perhaps the English reader could hardly obtain a better idea of it than by imagining a blending of the manner of Coleridge's idylls with that of Shelley's Alastor. It admits of translation into English; while an adequate rendering of the strictly lyrical poems, so smooth and yet so muscular, like the marble statue of an athlete, would be an achievement of very great difficulty. Perhaps the following little piece may convey some idea of Leopardi's manner in blank verse. Few are the poems in which a mere triviality has been made the occasion of a meditation so sublime:

Dear to me ever was this lonely hill, And this low hedge, whose potent littleness Forbids the vast horizon to the eye.