How he improved it may best be gathered from his address. To the American reader, accustomed to a blunter appeal, the famous _Sagra_ will seem singularly uninflammatory--intensely vague, and literary. One wonders how it could fire that, vast throng which poured out along the Genoa road and filled the little Garibaldian town. But one must remember that nine months of hesitation had prepared Italian minds for the poet's theme--the future of Italy. He linked the present crisis of choice with the heroic memories of that first making of a nation, "_Oggi sta sulla patria un giorno di porpora; e questo é un ritorno per una nova dipartita, o gente d'Italia!_"--A purple day is dawning for the Fatherland and this is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy! The return for the new departure--to make a larger, greater Italy, just as the Thousand had departed from this spot to gather the fragments of a nation into one. "All that you are, all that you have, and yourselves, give it to the flame-bearing Italy!" And in conclusion he invoked in a new beatitude the strong youth of Italy who must bear their country to these new triumphs: "O happy those who have more because they can give more, can burn more.... Happy those youths who are famished for glory, because they will be appeased.... Happy the pure in heart, happy those who return with victory, because they will see the new face of Rome, the recrowned brow of Dante, the triumphal beauty of Italy." The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's appeal. The _Sagra_ was read in the wineshops of little villages, on the streets of the cities. The voice of the poet reached to that fount of racial idealism, of patriotism, that glows in the hearts of all real Italians. He tied their heroic past with the heroic opportunity of the present. And he did not speak of the "unredeemed" or of the "aspirations." Instead, "This is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!" The politician, awaiting in Rome the effect of his advice to choose the safe path, must have wondered, as too many Americans wondered, how this poet fellow could stir such mad passion by his fine figures of birds and sea! But there was a spirit abroad in Italy that would not be appeased with "compensations": the poet had the following of all "young Italy." * * * * * D'Annunzio came to Rome. Not at once. A whole week elapsed after the _Sagra_ at Quarto, the 5th of May, before he reached Rome--a week of growing tumult, of anti-Giolitti demonstrations, in which his glowing words could sink like hot wine into the hearts of the people. The delay was well considered. If the poet had seized the occasion of Quarto, he made his appearance on the larger scene after the interest of the whole nation had been heightened by reading his address.