to the roar of Vesuvius, down to the rain pattering at the poet’s window, or the rattle of the carriage resuming its journey after the storm, these descriptions impress by their perfect adequacy and their complete fusion of speech and thought, and it can only be objected to them that they are finer than the moralities they usher in. So wrote the Greeks, and the recovery of an apparently lost type makes amends for the monotony of Leopardi’s dismal message to mankind and the extreme limitation of his range of thought. In his later days his horizon seemed to expand; his serio-comic _Paralipomeni_, already noticed with other examples of its class, displays an unexpected versatility, and his last ode, _La Ginestra_, inspired by the hardy and humble broom-plant flourishing on the brink of the lava-fields of Vesuvius, is more original in conception and ampler in sweep than any of its predecessors. It somewhat resembles Shelley’s _Mont Blanc_; as Shelley’s _Triumph of Life_, with equal unconsciousness on the author’s part, approximates to Leopardi’s first important poem, the _Appressamento alla Morte_. They had here a common model in Petrarch. Leopardi’s poems, though the majority are in blank verse, may generally be defined as canzoni, either odes in the strict sense of the term, addresses to friends, impassioned outpourings of lonely thought akin to Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” or apostrophes to inanimate objects, such as the moon, the natural friend of the melancholy poet, or the Vesuvian broom-plant, already mentioned. A few pieces, such as _Il Primo Amore_, _Il Risorgimento_, are autobiographical; in these Leopardi usually adopts _terza rima_ or the ordinary rhymed metres. Personal as these pieces are in subject, they are not really more subjective than the rest. Leopardi is entirely devoid of inventive power: the wandering shepherd of Asia, mouthpiece for one of his finest poems, is the author in everything but costume. Three of the most celebrated odes, _To Italy_, _On the Florentine Monument to Dante_, and _To Angelo Mai on the Recovery of Cicero De Republica_, may be styled patriotic; but although the love of Italy is clearly and eloquently expressed, the scorn of her actual condition, the fault of no one then breathing, is so bitter and contumelious that the effect is anything but Tyrtæan. These are nevertheless masterpieces of noble diction, and little short of miraculous for the age of twenty, at which they were produced. It is perhaps a defect that lines are frequently left unrhymed, and that the ear is thus defrauded of an anticipated satisfaction.