Page:The National Idea in Italian Literature.djvu/47

 looks in the name of the Italian people to King Humbert for the fulfilment of the national destiny: —

Gabriele d'Annunzio, in his funeral oration on the death of Carducci in 1907, uttered the pregnant words: "Giosue Carducci—il quale credeva e affermava essere la civiltà italica elemento necessario, come fu già primo, alla vita della civiltà mondiale—lega agli Italiani d'oggi l'orgoglio di stirpe e la volontà di operare" ("Giosue Carducci—who believed and declared that the Italian civilisation is a necessary element, even as it was of old, in the life of the civilisation of the world—bequeathes to the Italians of to-day the pride of race and the will to act"). And Gabriele d'Annunzio himself, in his splendid Canzoni della gesta d'oltremare and his more recent orations Per la più grande Italia, came forward as the apostle of the Greater Italy of the future, creating a kind of new national romanticism, a conception of Italy's destiny as a nation, blended from the classical glories of Rome, the mighty history of the Italian maritime republics of the Middle Ages, the heroic Garibaldean epic:— 35