Page:Carducci - Poems of Italy.djvu/21

 of the Italian struggle, from the first faint dawn to the golden morning.

But the making of Italy was not to be completed, perhaps naturally, as gloriously as it had been commenced. Carducci, who, when Vittorio Emanuele first flung down the gauntlet of defiance before Austria had hailed the Piedmontese king as the hero-liberator of his country, watched with small patience the dallyings and pettiness displayed by the monarchical party after its accession to power. The transference of the capital from Turin to Florence, with the implied abandonment of Rome, was the first blow to his loyalty. The acceptance of Venice from the hands of France, the treatment inflicted on Garibaldi, the long delay that intervened before the Government could be driven, with manifest unwillingness, finally to occupy Rome—all these political intrigues and calculations were abhorrent to the poet. He had been given the Chair of Italian Literature at the University of Bologna in 1860, and had moved to that city in consequence. Gradually he became affiliated with the Republican party there, and the poem "After Aspromonte" ("Dopo Aspromonte") written in 1863, put the seal upon

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