We, while the world goes on its road eat out our hearts, and double is our torment, because it moves, because it moves so slowly. So, when the lumb’ring waggon passes by the cottage, and the heavy dray-horse imprints the soil with thudding hoofs, the dog springs from the hedgerow, swift as wind, runs after it, before it; whines and bays. The waggon has passed onward slowly, slowly; the dog comes sneezing back to the farm-yard. “_In the Country_” includes eighteen charming little pieces in which the precision of the poet’s wording reveals itself with striking clearness. One tiny picture we may translate. Each object in it is distinct; and a feeling of aerial perspective is given to it by the long-drawn notes of the _stornello_ which are suggested at its close. OCTOBER EVENING. Along the road, see, on the hedge laugh bunches of red berries; in the ploughed fields move homewards to the stall slowly the oxen. Comes down the road a beggar-man who drags his slow step through sharp-rustling leaves: in the fields a maiden raises to the wind her song: _Flower of the thornbush!_ Two specially charming collections occur under the heading “_Primavera_” and “_Dolcezze_.” One little touch in the latter may perhaps be given. WITH THE ANGELS. They were in flower, the lilacs and the olives: and she sat sewing at a bridal dress: nor had the air yet opened buds of stars, nor the mimosa folded yet a leaf, when she laughed out; yea, laughed, oh small black swallows; laughed suddenly. But with whom, at what? She laughed, so, with the angels, with those clouds of gold, those clouds of rose-colour. Girls sewing or weaving, it may be remarked in passing, occur often in Pascoli’s verse: one feels in them the pulse of the strong domestic affections that course through the poet’s inner life. In “_Tristezze_” Nature breathes different suggestions: it has the sweet languidness of a fine autumn day, with recollections of a gentle melancholy. A good many people have written about empty nests; but the touch, in the following quotation, of the feather on the point of being blown away, yet clinging on, is surely individual. THE NEST. From the wild rose-bush, just a skeleton, there hangs a nest. How in the spring bursts from it, filling all the air, the twitter of the chattering housemates! Now there’s but one small feather. At the wooing of the wind it hesitates, beats lightly; like to some ancient dream in soul severe that ever flies and yet is never fled. And now the eye turns downward from the heavens— the heavens to which one last full harmony rose glorious, and died into the air— and fixes on the earth, on which the leaves lie rotting; whilst in waves the wind weeps through the lonely country.