Ah! briefly perished, likewise, My own sweet hope; and destiny denied me Youth, even in my childhood! Alas, alas, belovèd, Companion of my childhood! Alas, my mournèd hope! how art thou vanished Out of my place forever! This is that world? the pleasures, The love, the labors, the events, we talked of, These, when we prattled long ago together? Is this the fortune of our race, O Heaven? At the truth's joyless dawning, Thou fellest, sad one, with thy pale hand pointing Unto cold death, and an unknown and naked Sepulcher in the distance. III These pieces fairly indicate the range of Leopardi, and I confess that they and the rest that I have read leave me somewhat puzzled in the presence of his reputation. This, to be sure, is largely based upon his prose writings--his dialogues, full of irony and sarcasm--and his unquestionable scholarship. But the poetry is the heart of his fame, and is it enough to justify it? I suppose that such poetry owes very much of its peculiar influence to that awful love we all have of hovering about the idea of death--of playing with the great catastrophe of our several tragedies and farces, and of marveling what it can be. There are moods which the languid despair of Leopardi's poetry can always evoke, and in which it seems that the most life can do is to leave us, and let us lie down and cease. But I fancy we all agree that these are not very wise or healthful moods, and that their indulgence does not fit us particularly well for the duties of life, though I never heard that they interfered with its pleasures; on the contrary, they add a sort of zest to enjoyment. Of course the whole transaction is illogical, but if a poet will end every pensive strain with an appeal or apostrophe to death--not the real death, that comes with a sharp, quick agony, or “after long lying in bed”, after many days or many years of squalid misery and slowly dying hopes and medicines that cease even to relieve at last; not this death, that comes in all the horror of undertaking, but a picturesque and impressive abstraction, whose business it is to relieve us in the most effective way of all our troubles, and at the same time to avenge us somehow upon the indefinitely ungrateful and unworthy world we abandon--if a poet will do this, we are very apt to like him. There is little doubt that Leopardi was sincere, and there is little reason why he should not have been so, for life could give him nothing but pain.