His pathos and tenderness, expressed in language of the most perfect purity and sweetness, and adorned with the rainbow hues of his vivid imagination, produce an effect more poetical than words can describe. I know of no lyric poet who keeps the mind of his reader under a more potent spell. Others, like Horace and Alfred de Musset, may be more entertaining, others, again, like Keats and Shelley, may delight us with airier and more brilliant flights of fancy, but Leopardi leads us to the brink of abysses and shows us their unfathomable depth. He always writes from his heart, a rare quality, for we may find twenty poets who write from the head for one who writes from the heart. He never attempts a task for which he is unfitted. His powers of reasoning in verse are very great, but his argument never becomes unpoetical, never becomes dryly didactic. If his works have a fault, it is that now and then the poems have a tendency to fall off towards the end, and in his later works there is a certain languor of style, probably the result of ill-health. He is a great master of blank verse, and only in one of the poems in that metre, the _Palinodia,_ does he become heavy and prolix. Sometimes, when he is not sustained by any great thought, his extreme simplicity degenerates into poverty. Very few poets could venture to be as simple as Leopardi. His works have the effect of growing upon the reader. The second perusal pleases better than the first, and the more they are read, the more they are admired. In quantity of verse produced, he is surpassed by many writers; but in quality, by none. His prose works, like his poems, are few in number and short in dimension. They comprise dialogues (a form of which he was very fond), a few essays, and over one hundred detached fragmentary thoughts. They make only a small volume of most unimposing bulk, but the beauties of thought and style are so great that many critics have extolled them as the most perfect production of Italian prose. They all set forth his pessimism and his melancholy, but with so much art and variety, that while they convince us of the world's misery, they also enchant us with its beauty. Leopardi made a profound study of the great prose writers of the Fourteenth Century, and he alone succeeds in reproducing to perfection the freshness and harmony of their style. Some passages are so magnificent that they cry out aloud to be put into verse. In his prose we find less of his heart (that wonderful heart that embraced the whole world in its sympathy) and more of the vivacity of his fancy than in his verse.