Unlike the exuberant Monti, Foscolo wrote little poetry, but his scanty production is of choice quality. His most celebrated poem is the _Sepolcri_ (1807), which in style and subject bears a remarkable resemblance to the finest poem America has yet given to the world, Bryant’s _Thanatopsis_. The American poet has conceived his work in a larger and grander spirit, and consequently surpasses Foscolo in the sublimity of his thought, though the latter’s poem is longer and adorned with episodes, and in merit of execution there may be little to choose. Bryant dwells on the majesty of death; Foscolo on the reverence due to the tomb, and the immortality of the memories of the great--a fine theme undoubtedly, and deserving of the monumental eloquence with which he has adorned it, but small if measured against Bryant’s. Foscolo’s other most considerable poetical composition, his _Hymns to the Graces_, celebrated as the beneficent spirits of Greece, Italy, and an ideal world, was long but an aggregation of fragments, and was recovered as a whole only in 1856. The fastidious author could never satisfy himself, and the result is a production more remarkable for high polish than warmth of poetic feeling. It is just such a poem as Landor might have written. Foscolo’s tragedies, _Ajax_ and _Ricciarda_, are fine compositions in the spirit of Alfieri: the former, notwithstanding its classical theme, has a relation to contemporary circumstances, Moreau being depicted as Ajax, and Bonaparte as Agamemnon. The few minor poems of Foscolo are admirable, full of weighty lines that imprint themselves on the memory. As a critic he accomplished more than it will be easy to accomplish after him, coming just at the moment when Europe, weary of the superficial æsthetics of the eighteenth century, was anxiously looking for a guide to the spirit of the past. It is as much by this happy fortune as by their intrinsic merit that his essays mark an era in the literary history of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, and Boccaccio.