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Rh through intimacy. But now that he is dead, I feel as though I had known him, I feel him nearer, I might almost say that he has become my friend. I seem to have seen that sad and deeply-lined face of his, those wide-open eyes that saw only high and distant things. I seem to have heard his voice thundering the pleas of idealism amid friends in the café or on the street. But I never knew him.

They say that one evening, not many years before his death, when he was leaving Bologna for Casolavalsenio, he was sitting alone in the dark in a third-class compartment, when some one stepped up to the open door and asked: “Who is in here?”

And out of the darkness came a great deep voice that answered: “The greatest writer in Italy!”

The reply was meant as a melancholy jest and a lyric sarcasm, but it was not without its truth. Alfredo Oriani was in reality one of the greatest Italian writers of the nineteenth century.