The note of this philosophy is given at once in the preface of the “_Poemetti_,” addressed to his sister Maria. He gives a short indication, rather than description, of his new home with its church-towers and bells, its mountains and its rivers, its field-birds, its swallows, martins and rock-swallows, and then exclaims, addressing them:— “Oh yes, there was a time when we did not live so near you. And if you knew what grief was ours then, what weeping, what noisy solitude, what secret and continuous anguish!”—“But come, man, think not on it,” you say to me.—“Nay, let us think on it. Know that the long sweetness of your voices is born of the echoes they arouse of that past grief: that things would not be so beautiful now had they not been so black before: that I should not find so much pleasure in small motives of joy, had the suffering not been so great; had it not come from all sources of grief, from Nature and from Society; and had it not wounded me soul and body, mind and feeling. Is it not so, Maria? Blessèd, then, blessèd be grief.” And then, further on, after a charming picture of a martin that feeds, under his eaves, the abandoned nestlings of her enemy the swallow, he breaks out:— “Men, I will speak as in a fable for children: Men, imitate that martin. Men, be content with little, and love each other within the limits of the family, of the nation, of humanity.” Twice the poet returns to the same subject. A collection of four short pieces entitled “_The Hermit_,” compact with thought, ends as follows:— IV. And the pale hermit veiled his eyes, and lo throughout his heart there streamed the sweet sleep of his weary life. When he awoke (he was dropping down broad, still writers in a drifting ship) he cried: Let me remember, Lord! God, let me dream! Nothing is more sweet, God, than the end of grief, but ’tis grievous to forget it; for ’tis hard to cast away the flower that only smells when plucked. In “_The Two Children_” two little ones, having come to blows in heroic fashion at their play one evening, are ignominiously swept off to bed by their mother. In the dark, full of denser shadows, their sobbing gradually ceases, they draw nearer to each other, and when the mother comes to look at them, shading the light with her hand, she finds them pressed close together, good beyond their wont, asleep. And she tucks them in with a smile. The third part takes up the parable as follows:— III. Men! in the cruel hour when the wolf is lord, think on the shade of destiny unknown that wraps us round, and on the silence awesome that reigns beyond the short noise of your brawling, the clamour of your warring— just a bee’s hum within an empty hive. Peace, men! in the prone earth too great’s the mystery, and only he who gets him brethren in his fear errs not. Peace, brethren! and let not the arms that now ye stretch, or shall, to those most near, know aught of strife or threat.