Page:The National Idea in Italian Literature.djvu/50

 The other is L'Altare, of Sem Benelli, written in the trenches shortly before the first taking of Gorizia: the altar being the Carso, that desolate upland wilderness of rocks and stones over which, later, after the disaster that proved one of the greatest moral victories in history, the third army (as one of the British correspondents reported) "came back with the discipline and stern regularity of a parade manœuvre." Upon that altar, Benelli wrote. Victory had ascended to place the ring of Italy upon the finger of Trieste:—

But the poet even then pictured an image of Victory, mangled with wounds and with a countenance of sorrow, as the Italian soldier—"il mite soldato d'Italia"—surmounted the crags and rocks that barred him from his goal. And he apostrophised Italy with her cities:—

for that desolate plateau of the Carso, drenched with Italian blood, becomes in the poet's  38