In 1906 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature and the entire literary world approved of the reward. Two years previously he had resigned his professorship, and parliament voted him a pension of twelve thousand lire a year for life, but it was of short duration, for he died in 1907. Mario Rapisardi, to whom a monument has been erected in his native town of Catania, and who is known best for his tragedy "Manfredi" and his philosophic poem, "La Palingenesi," and "Poesie religiose," was a ferocious critic of Carducci. In his poem entitled "Lucifer" there are many disparaging allusions to him. Rapisardi was a teacher and a poet, but a spiritual chameleon: a devout believer, he became a radicalist; a monarchist, he became a socialist; a romanticist, he became a classicist. He is one of the best specimens of the old order of poets. His "Falling Stars" and "The Impenitent" have a genuine lyric quality, and such poems as "To a Fire-fly" have movement, rhythm, and luminosity that are impressive. The only poet that approximated Carducci's stature was Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912). Though he was a few years younger, the period of his literary activity was contemporaneous. When Carducci died, Pascoli succeeded him for a few years in the University of Bologna. His personal story appealed tremendously to Italians, and he was of the masses in appearance and sentiment. After the assassination of his father by an unknown hand the family suffered great poverty, and as a boy the support of two younger sisters fell upon him, and like so many of the talented young men of Italy he accomplished it by teaching school. He was teaching in the high school of Leghorn in 1892 when he published "Myricae," upon which to-day his fame rests most securely. His verses gave him an immediate celebrity, and he was soon made professor of Latin and Greek in the University of Messina. From there he went to Pisa and soon afterward to Bologna. Pascoli has been called the greatest Latin poet after Virgil. Some of the titles of his volumes are "Poemetti" ("Little Poems"), "Poemi Conviviali" ("Convivial Poems"), "Odi e Inni" ("Odes and Hymns"), "Canti di Castelvecchio" ("Songs of Castelvecchio"), "Nuovi Poemetti" ("New Little Poems"), "Poemetti Italici" ("Little Poems of Italy"), "Le Canzoni di Re Enzio" ("The Songs of King Enzio"), and an interpretative volume of Dante entitled "Sotto il Velame" ("Beneath the Veil"). Despite the fact that he was an advanced political thinker, he taught his students to respect the law. He was the poetical evangelist of the humble, of the unfortunate, and of the physically venturesome. He sang of the cravings of the soul, of the problems of existence, of Christian acceptation, of the glory of Italy and the accomplishments of her sons. Posterity, however, is whispering that the name most worthy to be bracketed with Carducci is Gabriele D'Annunzio. I shall consider him in another chapter.