The _Myricæ_, now in its fifth edition, is a collection of the shortest of poems. Many of them are but a few lines long, that pass in Italian like the brush of wings and cannot be rendered in our heavier English. Now it is a little picture, cut like a sixteenth century cameo, of some detail of the country or of country life, generally with just a touch at the end that relieves the feeling of pure objectiveness, and suggests the Infinite which lies around and behind the fragment presented; now it is some philosophical maxim or reflection which has evidently become part of the poet’s individuality; now an impression of infancy, childhood, girlhood, old age; now a fine-wrought point of irony to prick the ignorance and arrogance of the Philistine. A consideration of Pascoli’s relation to Nature and the peasantry immediately suggests a comparison with Wordsworth. It is, however, a curious fact that the more one attempts to fix the similarity between the two, the more elusive does it prove to be. We might say, tentatively, that Pascoli is both more pagan and more human, notwithstanding _Margaret_ and _Michael_, than Wordsworth. He is more pagan in that his delight in the beauty of a natural object is more self-sufficing, therefore more intense; it is a delight that suggests no defined religious or quasi-religious ideas, though there is always a feeling, conscious or sub-conscious, that the object is an organic part of the Universe. He is more human in that the peasants too attract him more for their own sakes than for the moral reflections to which they may give rise. They are, moreover, peasants in the full sense of the word. They are an inseparable part of their surroundings, and their interest derives from their unbroken contact with Nature, who now favours, now destroys their toil. A carefully thought out parallel study of the two poets would without doubt be interesting: it would have to set out from the fact that the fundamentals of the philosophy of the two men are essentially different: the Christianity and Platonism of the English poet being replaced in the Italian—citizen of a nation which is rapidly casting off metaphysical speculation—by a frank facing of the possibilities and probabilities opened up by modern scientific research, by a passionate longing for truth built upon the rock of scientific fact. A reference to the poet’s lecture entitled _L’Era Nuova_ (The New Era) will put this point beyond dispute.