The ‘Vergini della Rocca’ (Maidens of the Crag), his last story, is more an idyllic poem than a novel.  Claudio Cantelmo, sickened with the corruption of Rome, retires to his old home in the Abruzzi, where he meets the three sisters Massimilla, Anatolia, Violante:  “names expressive as faces full of light and shade, and in which I seemed already to discover an infinity of grace, of passion, and of sorrow.”  It is inevitable that he should chose one of the three, but which?  And in the denouement the solution is only half implied.

D’Annunzio is now occupied with a new romance; and coming years will doubtless present him all the more distinctively as a writer of Italy on whom French inflences have been seed sowed in fertile ground.  The place in contemporary Italian of such work as his is indisputably considerable.

THE DROWNED BOY

From ‘The Triumph of Death’

All of a sudden, Albadora, the septuagenarian Cybele, she who had given life to twenty-two sons and daughters, came toiling up the narrow lane into the court, and indicating the neighboring shore, where it skirted the promontory on the left, announced breathlessly:—­

“Down yonder there has been a child drowned!”

Candia made the sign of the cross.  Giorgio arose and ascended to the loggia, to observe the spot designated.  Upon the sand, below the promontory, in close vicinity to the chain of rocks and the tunnel, he perceived a blotch of white, presumably the sheet which hid the little body.  A group of people had gathered around it.

As Ippolita had gone to mass with Elena at the chapel of the Port, he yielded to his curiosity and said to his entertainers:—­

“I am going down to see.”

“Why?” asked Candia.  “Why do you wish to put a pain in your heart?”

Hastening down the narrow lane, he descended by a short cut to the beach, and continued along the water.  Reaching the spot, somewhat out of breath, he inquired:—­

“What has happened?”

The assembled peasants saluted him and made way for him.  One of them answered tranquilly:—­

“The son of a mother has been drowned.”

Another, clad in linen, who seemed to be standing guard over the corpse, bent down and drew aside the sheet.

The inert little body was revealed, extended upon the unyielding sand.  It was a lad, eight or nine years old, fair and frail, with slender limbs.  His head was supported on his few humble garments, rolled up in place of pillow,—­the shirt, the blue trousers, the red sash, the cap of limp felt.  His face was but slightly livid, with flat nose, prominent forehead, and long, long lashes; the mouth was half open, with thick lips which were turning blue, between which the widely spaced teeth gleamed white.  His neck was slender, flaccid as a wilted stem, and seamed with tiny creases.  The jointure of the arms at the shoulder looked feeble.  The arms