Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/255

Rh. He had just begun to emerge from the silence into which a deaf and brutal indifference had banished him, when Fate thrust him into that other silence from which there is no emerging save at the summons of glory.

Some three years before Oriani’s death, Giosue Carducci had passed to the heaven of recognized glories, amid a national adoration which took well nigh the form of apotheosis. Carducci was a greater man than Oriani, to be sure, but they differed far more widely in fame than in desert. They were not friends, but Oriani would have been the one man worthy to be the companion of Carducci, through the loftiness of his genius and the virility of his eloquence; far more worthy than the so-called disciples of Carducci, who were scarcely capable of following feebly the letter of his work, and were utterly remote from its spirit, from its temper, from its dignity—parlor kittens playing about the bed of a sick lion whose roaring days were over.

As poet and as philologist, Oriani would have suffered by the comparison; but as thinker and as historian he unquestionably surpassed Carducci, and would have surpassed him still more notably had he felt around him that affectionate and intelligent approval which may be scorned by those who fail to win it, but serves none the less to encourage even the most vigorous. Both