Well, the mighty book of Nature Chapter first and last must have; Yours is now the light of heaven, Ours the darkness of the grave. But, then, if you ask it, We lived greatly in our turn; We were grand and glorious, Gino, Ere our friends up there were born! O majestic mausoleums, City walls outworn with time, To our eyes are even your ruins Apotheosis sublime! O barbarian unquiet Raze each storied sepulcher! With their memories and their beauty All the lifeless ashes stir. O'er these monuments in vigil Cloudless the sun flames and glows In the wind for funeral torches,-- And the violet, and the rose, And the grape, the fig, the olive, Are the emblems fit of grieving; 'T is, in fact, a cemetery To strike envy in the living. Well, in fine, O brother corpses, Let them pipe on as they like; Let us see on whom hereafter Such a death as ours shall strike! 'Mongst the anthems of the function Is not _Dies Irae_? Nay, In all the days to come yet, Shall there be no Judgment Day? In a vein of like irony, the greater part of Giusti's political poems are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point and the _tang_ of their local expressions. It was the habi the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and originality--and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to demand of a poet--it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by these words and phrases the frankness and fineness of dialect. But Giusti had so much gentleness, sweetness, and meekness in his heart, that I do not like to leave the impression of him as a satirist last upon the reader. Rather let me close these meager notices with the beautiful little poem, said to be the last he wrote, as he passed his days in the slow death of the consumptive. It is called A PRAYER. For the spirit confused With misgiving and with sorrow, Let me, my Saviour, borrow The light of faith from thee. O lift from it the burden That bows it down before thee. With sighs and with weeping I commend myself to thee; My faded life, thou knowest, Little by little is wasted Like wax before the fire, Like snow-wreaths in the sun. And for the soul that panteth For its refuge in thy bosom, Break, thou, the ties, my Saviour, That hinder it from thee. FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARO I