Doth no one fight for thee, no one defend thee, None of thy own? Arms, arms! For I alone Will fight and fall for thee. Grant me, O Heaven, my blood Shall be as fire unto Italian hearts! Where are thy sons? I hear the sound of arms, Of wheels, of voices, and of drums; In foreign fields afar Thy children fight and fall. Wait, Italy, wait! I see, or seem to see, A tumult as of infantry and horse, And smoke and dust, and the swift flash of swords Like lightning among clouds. Wilt thou not hope? Wilt thou not lift and turn Thy trembling eyes upon the doubtful close? For what, in yonder fields, Combats Italian youth? O gods, ye gods, For other lands Italian swords are drawn! Oh, misery for him who dies in war, Not for his native shores and his beloved, His wife and children dear, But by the foes of others For others' cause, and cannot dying say, “Dear land of mine, The life thou gavest me I give thee back.” This suffers, of course, in translation, but I confess that in the original it wears something of the same perfunctory air. His patriotism was the fever-flame of the sick man's blood; his real country was the land beyond the grave, and there is a far truer note in this address to Death. And thou, that ever from my life's beginning I have invoked and honored, Beautiful Death! who only Of all our earthly sorrows knowest pity: If ever celebrated Thou wast by me; if ever I attempted To recompense the insult That vulgar terror offers Thy lofty state, delay no more, but listen To prayers so rarely uttered: Shut to the light forever, Sovereign of time, these eyes of weary anguish! I suppose that Italian criticism of the present day would not give Leopardi nearly so high a place among the poets as his friend Ranieri claims for him and his contemporaries accorded. He seems to have been the poet of a national mood; he was the final expression of that long, hopeless apathy in which Italy lay bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his governments, and the reëstablishment of all the little despots, native and foreign, throughout the peninsula. In this time there was unrest enough, and revolt enough of a desultory and unorganized sort, but every struggle, apparently every aspiration, for a free political and religious life ended in a more solid confirmation of the leaden misrule which weighed down the hearts of the people. To such an apathy the pensive monotone of this sick poet's song might well seem the only truth; and one who beheld the universe with the invalid's loath eyes, and reasoned from his own irremediable ills to a malign mystery presiding over all human affairs, and ordering a sad destiny from which there could be no defense but death, might have the authority of a prophet among those who could find no promise of better things in their earthly lot.