This is a yearning, however, that Signor D’Annunzio may at last strike us as supremely formed to gratify; so promptly we find in him as a literary figure the highest expression of the reality that our own conditions were to fail of making possible. He has immediately the value of giving us by his mere logical unfolding the measure of our shortcomings in the same direction, that of our timidities and penuries and failures. He throws a straighter and more inevitable light on the esthetic consciousness than has, to my sense, in our time, reached it from any other quarter; and there is many a mystery that properly interrogated he may help to clear up for us, many an explanation of our misadventure that—as I have glanced at it—he may give. He starts with the immense advantage of enjoying the invoked boon by grace and not by effort, of claiming it under another title than the sweat of his brow and the aspiration of his culture. He testifies to the influence of things that have had time to get themselves taken for granted. Beauty at any price is an old story to him; art and form and style as the aim of the superior life are a matter of course; and it may be said of him, I think, that, thanks to these transmitted and implanted instincts and aptitudes, his individual development begins where the struggle of the mere earnest questioner ends. Signor D’Annunzio is earnest in his way, quite extraordinarily—which is a feature of his physiognomy that we shall presently come to and about which there will be something to say; but we feel him all the while in such secure possession of his heritage of favouring circumstance that his sense of intellectual responsibility is almost out of proportion. This is one of his interesting special marks, the manner in which the play of the esthetic instinct in him takes on, for positive extravagance and as a last refinement of freedom, the crown of solicitude and anxiety. Such things but make with him for ornament and parade; they are his tribute to civility; the essence of the matter is meanwhile in his blood and his bones. No mistake was possible from the first as to his being of the inner literary camp—a new form altogether of perceptive and expressive energy; the question was settled by the intensity and variety, to say nothing of the precocity, of his early poetic production.