Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/380

362 For, as I sit and muse, my fancy frames Intermimble space beyond its bound, And silence more than human, and secure Unutterable and unending rest, ''Where even the heart hath peace. And as I hear'' The faint winds breath among the trees, my mind Compares these lispings with the infinity hush Of that invisible distance, and the dead And unborn hours of dim eternity ''With this hour and its voices. Thus my thought'' Gulfing infinity doth swallow up; And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea."

Leopardi's prose works, his correspondence and philological essays excepted, are, like his poetry, limited in extent and in range of subject, but incomparable for refinement and beauty of form. He deemed a perfect prose more beautiful and more difficult of achievement than poetry of like rank, and related to it as the undraped figure to the figure clothed. The most remarkable of his prose writings are the Dialogues, which almost all turn upon the everlasting theme of the misery of mankind, varied in the exposition with a grace and fanciful ingenuity, recjilling the little apologues in Turgenev's Senilia. In one, Mercury and Atlas play at ball with the earth, become light as tinder by internal decay and the extinction of life; in another, the earth and the moon compare notes on the infelicity of their respective inhabitants; in another, Momus and Prometheus descend to earth to investigate the success of the latter's philanthropic inventions, which have answered Momus's expectations better than his; in another, Tasso's familiar genius promises to make him happy in the only possible manner, by a pleasing dream. Comparison is continually suggested with two great writers, Lucian and Pascal, and