Page:Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 - Volume 2.djvu/214

 poet. In these, his diction is exquisitely finished, and his conceptions rise to the sublime. No reader can fail of being carried away by the pathos and fire of the chorus in Carmagnola, describing the horrors of the wars of invasion in Italy, which became civil contests, as the various states adhered to one or other of the foreign powers, who poured down from the Alps for their destruction. The “Cinque Maggio” is, out of his own country, the most popular of Manzoni’s odes, but this chorus and the sacred hymns obtain the greatest meed of praise in Italy.

The “Promessi Sposi” followed. This, to a certain degree, is an imitation of the romances of Walter Scott: it rises above in grandeur of description and in unity and nobility of purpose, though in inexhaustible fecundity of character, the Scotch writer surpasses the Italian. The historian Ripamonti suggested his subjects. The account of the Innominato is to be found in his pages, as well as that of the errors of a high-born nun—of a sedition, a famine, a pestilence—of the character and life of Federigo Borromeo; but these, though suggested by history, are treated with a poetic fire, an originality of idea, and a vitality, which belongs entirely to Manzoni himself. His tale is sustained by a moral, or rather religious scope. He desires in his romance to prove that society, both civil and political, is diseased, and