SOURCE: "The New Literature," in History of Italian Literature, translated by Joan Redfern, 1931. Reprint, Basic Books, Inc., 1959, pp. 833-947.

In the following excerpt, De Sanctis describes the philosophical underpinnings of Italian Romanticism.

[At the opening of the nineteenth] century the Abate Monti was still in his zenith, with lesser planets revolving around him. Foscolo in his solitude was planning his Grazie, and Romagnosi was transmitting to the new generation the thought of the vanquished century. And precisely in 1815, amid the clamour of mighty events, there came to the light that little booklet called Inni which nobody bothered about. The eighteenth century was closed by Foscolo's Odes; the nineteenth was opened by Manzoni's Hymns. The first poems of the new century had names such as "Christmas," "The Passion," "The Resurrection," "Pentecost." Now the old literature, as we know, had never been wanting in its Christmases, Jesuses, and Marys, material...