Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/417

Rh honour of a Senator of the Kingdom. A Liberal but a Royalist, a freethinker but a theist, he is happily placed to exert a reconciling and moderating influence alike in the political and the intellectual sphere. The difficulties of translating Carducci's more characteristic poems are almost insuperable. He is not in the least obscure, but his noble and austere form is indissolubly wedded to the sense, and in reproduction his bronze too often becomes plaster. Many versions, moreover, would be required to render justice to the various aspects of his many-sided genius—his love of country, his passion for beautiful form, his Latin and Hellenic enthusiasm, his photographic intensity of descriptive touch, his sympathy for honest labour and uncomplaining poverty, his capacity for caressing affection and scathing indignation. The following poem powerfully exhibits his intense devotion to the past, and faith in the future of his Italy. The subject is the statue of Victory in the Temple of Vespasian at Brescia; but to appreciate the full force of the poem, it must be known that the statue was a recent discovery of happiest augury (1826), and that Brescia had been the scene of an heroic defence and a cruel sack in the uprising against the Austrians in 1848:

Hast thou, high Virgin, wings of good augury Waved o'er the crouching, targeted phalanxes, With knee-propt shield and spear protended,  ''Biding the shock of the hostile onset? ''

Or hast thou, soaring in front of the eagles, Led surging swarms of Marsian soldiery, With blaze of fulgent light the neighing Parthian steed and his lord appalling?