he selects than by the expression he gives them.  In his poetry there is passion, but his subjects are usually those to which love is accessory rather than essential; and he cares better to sing of universal and national destinies as they concern individuals, than the raptures and anguishes of youthful individuals as they concern mankind.”  He was original in his way; his attitude toward both the classic and the romantic schools is shown in the following passage from his autobiography, which at the same time brings out his patriotism.  He says:—­

“It seemed to me strange, on the one hand, that people who, in their serious moments and in the recesses of their hearts, invoked Christ, should in the recesses of their minds, in the deep excitement of poetry, persist in invoking Apollo and Pallas Minerva.  It seemed to me strange, on the other hand, that people born in Italy, with this sun, with these nights, with so many glories, so many griefs, so many hopes at home, should have the mania of singing the mists of Scandinavia, and the Sabbaths of witches, and should go mad for a gloomy and dead feudalism, which had come from the North, the highway of our misfortunes.  It seemed to me, moreover, that every Art of Poetry was marvelously useless, and that certain rules were mummies embalmed by the hand of pedants.  In fine, it seemed to me that there were two kinds of Art:  the one, serene with an Olympic serenity, the Art of all ages that belongs to no country; the other, more impassioned, that has its roots in one’s native soil....  The first that of Homer, of Phidias, of Virgil, of Tasso; the other that of the Prophets, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Byron.  And I have tried to cling to this last, because I was pleased to see how these great men take the clay of their own land and their own time, and model from it a living statue, which resembles their contemporaries.”

In another interesting passage he explains that his old drawing-master had in vain pleaded with the father to make his son a painter, and he continues:—­

“Not being allowed to use the pencil, I have used the pen.  And precisely on this account my pen resembles too much a pencil; precisely on this account I am often too much of a naturalist, and am too fond of losing myself in minute details.  I am as one who in walking goes leisurely along, and stops every minute to observe the dash of light that breaks through the trees of the woods, the insect that alights on his hand, the leaf that falls on his head, a cloud, a wave, a streak of smoke; in fine, the thousand accidents that make creation so rich, so various, so poetical, and beyond which we evermore catch glimpses of that grand mysterious something, eternal, immense, benignant, and never inhuman nor cruel, as some would have us believe, which is called God.”

The selections are from Howells’s ‘Modern Italian Poets,’ copyright 1887, by Harper and Brothers.

     COWARDS