_Brief strain with much in little rife; whose tone, As worlds untrodden rose upon his thought, Dante touched lightly; that Petrarca sought, Flower among flowers by gliding waters grown; That from trump epical of Tasso blown Pealed through his prison; that wert gravely fraught With voice austere by him who marble fought To free the spirit he divined in stone:--_ _To Æschylus new-born by Avon’s shore Thou camest harbinger of Art, to be A hidden cell for hidden sorrow’s store; On thee smiled Milton and Camoens; thee, His rout of lines unleashing with a roar, Bavius blasphemes; the dearer thence to me._ Carducci’s example could not but create a school of poets, many of great merit, but most of whom stand to him more or less in the relation of disciples to a master. The chief exception is the only one who can claim, like Timotheus, to “divide the crown,” GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO. D’Annunzio (born 1863) is a second Marini, endowed with an even more brilliant genius, and better armed against besetting faults. It is terrible to think what synchronism with Marini might have made of him, but it has been his good fortune to have had Carducci’s example before his eyes, and his merit to have profited by it. At the same time his genius is so distinct from Carducci’s as to vindicate for him an independent position. To employ Coventry Patmore’s happy application of a passage in Zephaniah to the poetic art, D’Annunzio rather represents “Beauty,” and Carducci “Bands”; the note of the one is restraint, and that of the other is exuberance. D’Annunzio’s verse is not cast in bronze like Carducci’s, nor has he his rival’s splendid virility or his devotion to ideal interests; his affluence is nevertheless so well restrained by a natural instinct for form that it never, as with Marini, becomes riotous extravagance. Some of the metrical forms, indeed, which, influenced as may be surmised by Mr. Swinburne, he has endeavoured to introduce, seem ill adapted to the genius of the Italian language, though they would probably succeed well in English. But nothing can be more satisfactory than the form of his sonnets or of his ballad-romances, and he has enriched Italian poetry with one new form of great beauty, the _rima nona_, a happy compromise between the terse purity of the national octave and the rich harmony, like the chiming of many waters, of the English Spenserian stanza, which no foreign literature has yet succeeded in acclimatising. It is also to his honour that, while no writer is more partial to the employment of unusual words, commonly derived from science or natural history, the effect is that of brilliant mosaic without a mosaic’s rigidity, but soft and liquid as a glowing canvas.