The difficulties of translating Carducci’s more characteristic poems are almost insuperable. He is not in the least obscure, but his noble and austere form is indissolubly wedded to the sense, and in reproduction his bronze too often becomes plaster. Many versions, moreover, would be required to render justice to the various aspects of his many-sided genius--his love of country, his passion for beautiful form, his Latin and Hellenic enthusiasm, his photographic intensity of descriptive touch, his sympathy for honest labour and uncomplaining poverty, his capacity for caressing affection and scathing indignation. The following poem powerfully exhibits his intense devotion to the past, and faith in the future of his Italy. The subject is the statue of Victory in the Temple of Vespasian at Brescia; but to appreciate the full force of the poem, it must be known that the statue was a recent discovery of happiest augury (1826), and that Brescia had been the scene of an heroic defence and a cruel sack in the uprising against the Austrians in 1848: _Hast thou, high Virgin, wings of good augury Waved o’er the crouching, targeted phalanxes, With knee-propt shield and spear protended, Biding the shock of the hostile onset?_ _Or hast thou, soaring in front of the eagles, Led surging swarms of Marsian soldiery, With blaze of fulgent light the neighing Parthian steed and his lord appalling?_ _Thy pinions folded, thy stern foot haughtily Pressing the casque of foeman unhelmeted;-- Whose fair renown for feat triumphant Art on the orb of thy shield inscribing?_ _An archon’s name, who boldly in face of Wrong The freeman’s law upheld and immunity? A consul’s, far and wide the Latin Limit and glory and awe enlarging?_ _Thee throned on Alpine pinnacle loftily, Radiant 'mid tempest, heralding might I hear_, Kings and peoples, here stands Italy, Weaponed to strike for her soil and honour. _Lydia, the while, a garland of flowerets, By sad October strewn o’er the wreck of Rome, To deck thee braids, and gently bending, Questioneth, as at thy foot she lays it:_ _“What thoughts, what visions, Victory, came to thee, Years on years in the humid imprisonment Of earth immured? the German horses Heardest thou stamp o’er thy brow Hellenic?”_ _“I heard,” she answers, flashing and fulminant, “Heard and endured, for glory of Greece am I, And strength of Rome, in bronze immortal Sped without flaw through the fleeting ages._ _“The ages passed like the twelve birds ominous, Descried by gaze of Romulus anciently: They passed, I rose: thy Gods, proclaiming, Italy, see! and thy buried heroes._