“Rejected and followed with scorn, My child, like a child born of sin, In the land where my darling was born, He lives exiled! A refuge to win From their hatred, he runs in dismay To my arms. But the day may yet be When my son shall the insult repay, I have nurtured him in, unto me! “If it chances that ever the slave Snaps the shackles that bind him, and leaps Into life in the heart of the brave The sense of the might that now sleeps-- To which people, which side shall I cleave? Which fate shall I curse with my own? To which banner pray Heaven to give The triumph? Which desire o'erthrown? “Italian, and sister, and wife, And mother, unfriended, alone, Outcast, I wander through life, Over shard and bramble and stone! Wretch! a mantle of shame thou hast wrought; Thou hast wrought it--it clingeth to thee, And for all that thou sufferest, naught From its meshes thy spirit shall free!” GIAMBATTISTA NICCOLINI I The school of Romantic poets and novelists was practically dispersed by the Austrian police after the Carbonari disturbances in 1821-22, and the literary spirit of the nation took refuge under the mild and careless despotism of the grand dukes at Florence. In 1821 Austria was mistress of pretty near all Italy. She held in her own grasp the vast provinces of Lombardy and Venetia; she had garrisons in Naples, Piedmont, and the Romagna; and Rome was ruled according to her will. But there is always something fatally defective in the vigilance of a policeman; and in the very place which perhaps Austria thought it quite needless to guard, the restless and indomitable spirit of free thought entered. It was in Tuscany, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, reigned over by a family set on the grand-ducal throne by Austria herself, and united to her Hapsburgs by many ties of blood and affection--in Tuscany, right under both noses of the double-headed eagle, as it were, that a new literary and political life began for Italy. The Leopoldine code was famously mild toward criminals, and the Lorrainese princes did not show themselves crueler than they could help toward poets, essayists, historians, philologists, and that class of malefactors. Indeed it was the philosophy of their family to let matters alone; and the grand duke restored after the fall of Napoleon was, as has been said, an absolute monarch, but he was also an honest man. This _galantuomo_ had even a minister who successfully combated the Austrian influences, and so, though there were, of course, spies and a censorship in Florence, there was also indulgence; and if it was not altogether a pleasant place for literary men to live, it was at least tolerable, and there they gathered from their exile and their silence throughout Italy. Their point of union, and their means of affecting the popular mind, was for twelve years the critical journal entitled the _Antologia_,