These extracts will enable the reader to form an idea of the power of thought and depth of feeling that characterise Leopardi's Poems, although the beauty of his diction may not be reproduced in all its purity and sweetness. Never was there a poet who knew how to handle the Italian language with greater skill, or to give it more enchanting melody or more varied cadences. If he has a fault, it is that he is sometimes too indifferent to ornament, and that his simplicity now and then degenerates into poverty and bareness. But when we remember what Italian poetry had become in his time, how artificial, how overladen with meretricious ornaments, we shall think him worthy of praise, rather than deserving of censure. His earlier poems are the most ornate, and it was only by degrees that he attained that crystal clearness of style for which we find no parallel in the Italian language. His frequent use of a capricious succession of rhymed and unrhymed lines allows him to develop his thoughts with perfect freedom; indeed, so easy is the metre, that were it not for his happy selection of words and exquisite variety of cadence, it would border dangerously on the slipshod; indeed, it does so in the works of his imitators, and of recent years it has been, probably for that reason, abandoned by poets in favour of systems more rigid and perhaps more epigrammatic. Leopardi had every characteristic of a great lyric poet. If his pessimism is sometimes too pronounced for many readers, it must be admitted that the evils of life are sufficiently numerous to justify his elegies; and he atones for any excess of gloom by the most exquisite pictures of nature and of love. The world appears more beautiful, though more terribly and darkly beautiful, in his poems than in reality. He has a rare power of musical diction which delights the ear even in his most melancholy passages. Indeed, the secret of his power lies in the unique and exquisite contrast between the gloom and bitterness of his thoughts and the sweetness and radiant beauty of his style. He has also the rare power of concentrating in a few lines a whole world of thought and emotion. Thus, in the _Risorgimento_: "Meco ritorna a vivere La piaggia, il bosco, il monte; Parla al mio core il fonte, Meco favella il mar. In the poem _To Sylvia_ quoted above, he calls her "his hope so much bewailed," "mia lacrimata speme." In the _Ricordanze_ he calls Nerina "his eternal sigh." Numerous other instances could be adduced. Take, for example, the lovely passage in the _Canto Notturno,_ where the shepherd apostrophizes the Moon: "Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina, Che si pensosa sei, tu forse intendi, Questo viver terreno, Il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia; Che sia questo morir, questo supremo Scolorar del sembiante, E perir della terra, e venir meno Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia."