His scientific life was upright, worthy of a serious searcher after truth; his emotional life disturbed and restless, worthy of one who sees face to face the truth he has long sought and desired, and rejoices in the power of laying it before mankind. Hence his lofty poetry, expressed not in verse but in prose, and especially in the _Scienza Nuova_. "Vico is a poet," writes Tommaseo: "he brings fire from smoke, and lively images from metaphysical abstractions: he reasons as he narrates and depicts while he reasons: over the mountain-tops of thought he does not walk, he flies; and in one sentence he often compresses more lyrical feeling than may be found in many an ode."[31] De Sanctis saw in the _Scienza Nuova_ the progress of a poem, almost a new _Divina commedia._ Sublime like Dante, he was more severe than Dante himself; if the lips of the Ghibelline show at times the flicker of "a passing smile," Vico looks at history with a face "that never smiles." Moreover, the man whose style has been so often criticised is not a commonplace writer; he was as careful a student of pure Tuscan[32] as he was a fine connoisseur, according to Capasso, of Latin phraseology.[33] But he was faulty in the arrangement of his books, because his mind did not master all the philosophical and historical material it had accumulated; he wrote carelessly because wildly and as if possessed by a demon: and hence arise the lack of proportion and the confusion in the various parts of his work, within single pages and single paragraphs. He often gives the impression of a bottle of water quickly inverted, in which the liquid trying to issue forth so presses against the narrow opening "that it comes out painfully, drop by drop." Painfully, by fragments, and disjointedly. One idea while he is expressing it recalls another, that a fact, and that another fact: he tries to say everything at once, and parenthesis branches off into parenthesis in a manner to make one's brain reel. But these chaotic periods, weighted as they are with original thoughts, are no less woven of striking phrases, statuesque words, phrases full of emotion, and picturesque images. A bad writer, if you will, but his is the kind of bad writing of which only great writers possess the secret. [Footnote 22: _Bill. vich._ p. 82.] [Footnote 23: _Opp._ vi. p. 93.] [Footnote 24: _Ibid._ vi. p. 5.] [Footnote 25: _Ibid._ v. p. 50 (note).] [Footnote 26: _Ibid._ ii. p. 123.] [Footnote 27: _Ibid._ ii. p. 148.] [Footnote 28: For instance in his letter to Saliani, November 18, 1725, published in _Bibl. vich._ pp. 97-8, the autograph being in my possession.] [Footnote 29: See the _Riposte_ in _Opp._ ii. _passim._] [Footnote 30: _Opp._ v. p. 10.] [Footnote 31: _G. B. Vico e il suo secolo_ in the volume _La Storia civile nella letteratura_ (Turin, Loescher, 1872), p. 104: cf. a judgment on Vico as a writer, _ibid._ pp. 9-10.] [Footnote 32: _Opp._ iv. pp. 333-4; vi. pp. 41, 140.]