Campanella’s claims as a vernacular writer rest entirely upon his poems, of which there are said to have been seven books. With the exception of some extracted from the documents of his trial by the diligence of Signor Amabile, all that remain are the sonnets printed in Germany by his disciple, Tobias Adami, in 1622, and forgotten until their republication by Orelli, in 1834. But for these pieces we should not know the real Campanella, whom they exhibit in a more favourable light, even as a thinker, than does the brilliant intuition, chequered with gross credulity, of his professedly philosophical writings. Like Michael Angelo’s, they are rather hewn than written--the utterances of a powerful intellect and a passionate heart seeking to express themselves through a medium but imperfectly mastered, hence vehement, abrupt, contorted even to the verge of absurdity, but full of substance, and as remote as possible from the polished inanity which is so frequently a reproach to the Italian sonnet. Addington Symonds, wrestling with Campanella as Campanella wrestled with his own language, has produced excellent translations, accompanied by a careful commentary. “That this sonnet,” he says of the following, “should have been written by a Dominican monk, in a Neapolitan prison, in the first half of the seventeenth century, is truly noteworthy:” _The people is a beast of muddy brain That knows not its own force, and therefore stands Loaded with wood and stone; the powerless hands Of a mere child guide it with bit and rein. One kick would be enough to break the chain; But the beast fears, and what the child demands It does; nor its own terror understands, Confused and stupefied by bugbears vain. Most wonderful! with its own hand it ties And gags itself--gives itself death and war For pence doled out by kings from its own store. Its own are all things between earth and heaven; But this it knows not, and if one arise To tell this truth, it kills him unforgiven._