O Pleasure, child of Pain, Vain joy which is the fruit Of bygone suffering overshadowèd And wrung with cruel fears Of death, whom life abhors; Wherein, in long suspense, Silent and cold and pale, Man sat, and shook and shuddered to behold Lightnings and clouds and winds, Furious in his offense! Beneficent Nature, these, These are thy bounteous gifts: These, these are the delights Thou offerest unto mortals! To escape From pain is bliss to us; Anguish thou scatterest broadcast, and our woes Spring up spontaneous, and that little joy Born sometimes, for a miracle and show, Of terror is our mightiest gain. O man, Dear to the gods, count thyself fortunate If now and then relief Thou hast from pain, and blest When death shall come to heal thee of all pain! “The bodily deformities which humiliated Leopardi, and the cruel infirmities that agonized him his whole life long, wrought in his heart an invincible disgust, which made him invoke death as the sole relief. His songs, while they express discontent, the discord of the world, the conviction of the nullity of human things, are exquisite in style; they breathe a perpetual melancholy, which is often sublime, and they relax and pain your soul like the music of a single chord, while their strange sweetness wins you to them again and again.” This is the language of an Italian critic who wrote after Leopardi's death, when already it had begun to be doubted whether he was the greatest Italian poet since Dante. A still later critic finds Leopardi's style, “without relief, without lyric flight, without the great art of contrasts, without poetic leaven,” hard to read. “Despoil those verses of their masterly polish,” he says, “reduce those thoughts to prose, and you will see how little they are akin to poetry.” I have a feeling that my versions apply some such test to Leopardi's work, and that the reader sees it in them at much of the disadvantage which this critic desires for it. Yet, after doing my worst, I am not wholly able to agree with him. It seems to me that there is the indestructible charm in it which, wherever we find it, we must call poetry. It is true that “its strange sweetness wins you again and again,” and that this “lonely pipe of death” thrills and solemnly delights as no other stop has done. Let us hear it again, as the poet sounds it, figuring himself a Syrian shepherd, guarding his flock by night, and weaving his song under the Eastern moon: