Leopardi’s blank verse is the finest in Italian literature. If it has neither the “wood-note wild” of Shakespeare’s sweetest passages, nor the voluminous harmony of Milton’s organ-music, nor the dainty artifice of Tennyson, it is fully on a par with the finest metrical performances of Shelley and Coleridge; and perhaps the English reader could hardly obtain a better idea of it than by imagining a blending of the manner of Coleridge’s idylls with that of Shelley’s _Alastor_. It admits of translation into English; while an adequate rendering of the strictly lyrical poems, so smooth and yet so muscular, like the marble statue of an athlete, would be an achievement of very great difficulty. Perhaps the following little piece may convey some idea of Leopardi’s manner in blank verse. Few are the poems in which a mere triviality has been made the occasion of a meditation so sublime: _Dear to me ever was this lonely hill, And this low hedge, whose potent littleness Forbids the vast horizon to the eye. For, as I sit and muse, my fancy frames Interminable space beyond its bound, And silence more than human, and secure Unutterable and unending rest, Where even the heart hath peace. And as I hear The faint wind’s breath among the trees, my mind Compares these lispings with the infinite hush Of that invisible distance, and the dead And unborn hours of dim eternity With this hour and its voices. Thus my thought Gulfing infinity doth swallow up; And sweet to me is shipwreck in this sea._