In 1856 he was nominated as Professor of Rhetoric at the Gymnasium of San Miniato al Tedesco but he became involved in political and literary controversies. He was refused government sanction to teach in a position offered at Arezzo, so he returned to Florence. He was poor and lived in extreme self-denial, frequenting libraries, storing his mind with Greek and Latin literature and finding some employment with the publisher, Barbèra, for whom he wrote prefaces, notes, etc., for Italian classics. Two griefs came within a year--the suicide of his brother, Dante, and the death of his father. In memory of his brother he wrote the lines “Alla memoria di D. C.” Happier days came when he married the gifted daughter of his relative and friend, Menicucci. His home life was stimulating and sympathetic. He had four children; to a daughter he gave the symbolic name of “Liberty.” Again death came to crush his spirit; his little boy, Dante, three years old, died the same year as Carducci’s mother. The latter, of fine Florentine family, had been a loved comrade to her son; and although he was reconciled to her death in old age, he rebelled, in deep grief, at the loss of the little boy, declaring “three parts of his life” had departed. The elegiac stanzas, “Funere mersit acerbo,”[46] written in a mood of longing for the child, are pathetic. His poems, as collected previous to 1870, showed political agitation and frequent bitterness and satire; many of these had appeared in the periodical, _Il Poloziano_. In 1860 he went to Pistoia as Professor of Greek and Latin; there he wrote his poem, “Sicilia e la rivoluzione,” celebrating Garibaldi’s Sicilian Expedition of that time. During the next ten years he passed through political changes of allegiance; when his _Hymn to Satan_[47] appeared, and “made him famous in a day,” (republished in 1869 over signature of “Enotrio Romano”) extolling the advance of Liberalism over the reactionary influences of both monarchy and church, he was declared to be an unqualified Republican. It was a daring _motif_ that the poet chose for his voice of “Revolt”; it required courage, at that time, to summon as witnesses to the progress of the “lord of the feast, Satan,” such names as Savonarola and Luther, Huss and Wycliffe. One reason for the immediate popularity of this poem may have been the flowing, almost lilting, form of four-line stanzas.