to what is cheerful, brilliant, or pathetic.  The dramatic element in human life, external to the personality of the poet, which exercised so strong a fascination over our ballad-bards and playwrights, has but little attraction for the Italian.  When he sings, he seeks to express his own individual emotions—­his love, his joy, his jealousy, his anger, his despair.  The language which he uses is at the same time direct in its intensity, and hyperbolical in its display of fancy; but it lacks those imaginative touches which exalt the poetry of personal passion into a sublimer region.  Again, the Italians are deficient in a sense of the supernatural.  The wraiths that cannot rest because their love is still unsatisfied, the voices which cry by night over field and fell, the water-spirits and forest fairies, the second-sight of coming woes, the presentiment of death, the warnings and the charms and spells, which fill the popular poetry of all Northern nations, are absent in Italian songs.  In the whole of Tigri’s collection I only remember one mention of a ghost.  It is not that the Italians are deficient in superstitions of all kinds.  Every one has heard of their belief in the evil eye, for instance.  But they do not connect this kind of fetichism with their poetry; and even their greatest poets, with the exception of Dante, have shown no capacity or no inclination for enhancing the imaginative effect of their creations by an appeal to the instinct of mysterious awe.

The truth is that the Italians as a race are distinguished as much by a firm grasp upon the practical realities of existence as by powerful emotions.  They have but little of that dreamy Schwaermerei with which the people of the North are largely gifted.  The true sphere of their genius is painting.  What appeals to the imagination through the eyes, they have expressed far better than any other modern nation.  But their poetry, like their music, is deficient in tragic sublimity and in the higher qualities of imaginative creation.

It may seem paradoxical to say this of the nation which produced Dante.  But we must remember not to judge races by single and exceptional men of genius.  Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisite emotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the keys of life so lightly, Ariosto, with the smile of everlasting April on his lips, and Tasso, excellent alone when he confines himself to pathos or the picturesque, are no exceptions to what I have just said.  Yet these poets pursued their art with conscious purpose.  The tragic splendour of Greece, the majesty of Rome, were not unknown to them.  Far more is it true that popular poetry in Italy, proceeding from the hearts of uncultivated peasants and expressing the national character in its simplicity, displays none of the stuff from which the greatest works of art in verse, epics and dramas, can be wrought.  But within its own sphere of personal emotion, this popular poetry is exquisitely melodious, inexhaustibly rich, unique in modern literature for the direct expression which it has given to every shade of passion.