SOURCE: “Giosuè Carducci.” Living Age 34, no. 3271 (16 March 1907): 698-700.

The following essay pays tribute to Carducci shortly after his death.

In Carducci rather than in any other Italian modern Italy seems to be summed up and expressed; he is the father as it were of the new generation, and his work in his art, like theirs in politics, is a struggle first for liberty and then for unity; his praise is that he achieved both and restored Poetry to Italy.

Born in 1836 in Valdicastello, near Pietrasanta, in the very garden of Tuscany, he came of an old family that had given a Gonfaloniere to Florence but was poor, his father being a doctor in the Pisan Maremma, that desert where for centuries nothing has broken the silence. There, in the midst of that marvellous and tragic country, the young Giosuè grew up, turning in the long evenings with his...