Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/419

Rh popularity. This is especially the case with his impassioned addresses to the dead or to contemporaries who have won his admiration, and the poems which depict ordinary life, such as "A Dream in Summer," "On a Saint Peter's Eve," and "The Mother," whose apparently loose but really well-knit texture is admirably reproduced by his American translator Mr. Sewall, and which are such pieces as Walt Whitman might have written if he had been a poet in virtue of his art as well as of his nature. Perhaps none of the shorter pieces is more expressive of his profound humanity than his apotheosis of patient toil under the figure of "The Ox," ably rendered by Mr. Sewall, a poem Egyptian in its grave massiveness and tranquil repose:

Carducci has rendered his country much service as a literary critic, especially of the Renaissance, and of the Risorgimento of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is not subtle or profound, but puts forth unanswerably propositions dictated by the soundest common-sense. There is something Teutonic as well as Italian