I hate thy Holy Empire; with my sword I should have thrust the crown from off the head Of thy good Frederick in Olona’s vale. O’er church and Empire, both now ruins sad, Thy song soars up, and high in heaven resounds-- Though Jove may die, the poet’s hymn remains. With one of those marked changes in his impulses and convictions which ever characterized Carducci, he broke away from tendencies towards German Romanticism and declared a “literary revolution” as his purpose in writing his most familiar odes, _Odi barbare_, 1873-1877. Back to the poetry of Greece and Rome he would lead the people, away from the romanticists and “sickly sentimentalism.” To his friends, Chiarini and Targioni, who were critics of these odes, he declared that the world’s greatest poets had been Homer, Pindar, Theocritus, Sophocles, and Aristophanes.[49] There was a great variety of meter in this collection; several poems that lacked rhymes seemed, to the hackneyed critics, unconventional in form. Mr. Bickersteth has informing comments upon Carducci’s _Metres in the Barbarian Odes_ and other poems, in his Introduction to his _Selection of Poems_, already cited. Among the examples of the Italian poet at his best, his most simple, flexible, and musical lines, one recalls from this collection such verses as “The Ideal,” “The Mother,” and “By the Urn of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Addressing one of his imaginary Greek women, Lalage, he unfolds his own deep, loving appreciation of the English poet in such couplets as these:[50] Vain are the joys of the present, they come and they fade like a blossom, Only in death dwells the truth and loveliness but in past days. Lo, on the mount of the centuries Clio hath nimbly descended, And bursts into song as she spreads her magnificent wings to the sky. * * * * * O heart of hearts, o’er this urn, thy cold, uncongenial prison, The warm spring blossoms again with the fragrance of flower and fruit. O heart of hearts, thy divine great father, the Sun, hath arisen, And lovingly bathes thee in light, poor heart that forever art mute. This poem, inspired by the grave of Shelley, is one of the most beautiful and appealing of the odes; to him the English poet was, in truth, “Poet of liberty,” with a “spirit Titanic.” In spite of the simplicity and directness of Carducci’s diction his poems have defied many translators, especially in English. It is interesting to note that two of his German translators have been winners of the Nobel prize in literature, Paul Heyse and Theodor Mommsen.