Page:Carducci - Poems of Italy.djvu/15



Giosue Carducci
HE life of Giosue Carducci, the foremost of living Italian poets, spans an epic period. He was born in 1835, when Italy was indeed little more than a "geographical expression," an aggregation of states separated from each other by wide differences in customs and even language, united only by common suffering under foreign tyranny. He is alive to-day, when the seemingly impossible fusion of these states has become an accomplished fact, and the kingdom of Italy is free not only as Napoleon III promised it should be, "from the Alps to the Adriatic," but from the Alps to the extremest tip of Sicily, and from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean.

It would hardly be possible for any man of strong feeling and quick imagination to have lived through such a struggle as that for Italian unity without having his character deeply influenced thereby. Carducci, moreover, was brought up in an environment and amid circumstances that still further tended to breed in him a peculiarly passionate love of country and hatred of foreign domination. His father was a physician 9