His students idolized him. When they left the university and returned to their various spheres of activity they carried his image in their hearts and sounded his praises with tongue or pen. They made propaganda con amore. No one is ever approved of universally in any country, probably least of any in Italy. When Carducci published his "Alla Regina d'Italia" ("Ode to the Queen of Italy"), one of his best--simple, musical, redolent of reverence and affection--he aroused the fury of the republicans, who called him traitor, and the scorn of the envious, who called him snob. In 1891, when he accepted a senatorship of the realm, the students of the University of Bologna howled and jeered at him, and many of the former students plucked or tore his image from their hearts. They had apotheosized the Great Commoner, and they saw in this truckling to royalty and honors weakness and vanity which they could not believe that he possessed. Yet in 1896, when he completed thirty-five years of service at the university, the event was celebrated for three successive days, and the outpouring of expressions of admiration and gratitude from colleagues and students, and from heads crowned with laurel and gold, has scarcely ever been paralleled. In an autobiographical sketch in the volume of "Poesie," of 1871, he relates with great detail the way in which he broke from his early parental teachings and acquired his new literary, political, and religious feelings. Following his Hellenic instincts, the religious trend in him was toward the paganism of the ancient Latin forefathers rather than toward the spirituality that had come in with the infusion of foreign blood. He rebelled against the passive dependence on the fame of her great writers, in which Italy had lived in the apathy of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement. The livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan disgusted him. His was the hope and joy of a nation waking to a new life. He was the poet of the national mood. Carducci is little known as a poet in this country. There are many reasons why his fame has not made headway in Anglo-Saxon countries. In the first place, he has not been extensively translated, and in the second place, although the subject of his song was so often liberty, his lines are so replete with erudite classic illusions that even though he could be translated he would be found to be hard reading. But more than all there is probably no poet whose matter loses so much of its music and its fire by translation as Carducci. Such exquisite verses as the "Idylls of the Lowlands," "The Ox," "The Hymn to the Seasons," "To the Fountains of Clitumnus" are translatable. It would require a Longfellow to do it so that they should not be emasculated.