And like good children sleeping ’twixt the sheets placid and white, be found, when unseen and unheard, above you bends Death, with her lighted lamp. The poet’s thought on death is given, with the insistence of one who is very much in earnest, in two recently delivered lectures, “_L’Era Nuova_,” and “_La Ginestra_,” (“Flower of the Broom,” a development of Leopardi’s exquisite poem); and again in two of his most beautiful poems, “_La Pace_” (published after the Milan riots), and “_Il Focolare_” (“_The Hearth_”). In the “_Ginestra_” Pascoli expounds Leopardi as follows:— “And look at the stars. Reflect that there was a time when they were thought to be what they appear; small, mere atoms of light.... Instead, it is the earth that is small, a mere grain of sand. To believe the earth large and stars small; or to believe, as is the case, that the stars are infinite in number and size, and the earth very small; these are the two religions, this is the σκότος and the φῶς: darkness and light. Look at Vesuvius the destroyer, the glare of the lava glowing in the darkness. Look at Death. Look it in the face, without drooping the head cowardly, without erecting it proudly. You will feel the necessity of being at peace with your fellow-men. And say not that all men know they are mortal, but that that has never kept anyone from doing ill. I tell you it is not enough to know it; you must have your soul saturated with it, and have but that in your soul. Men know, too, that the stars are large, or rather they give an idle assent to the learned who say so. They know it, that is, but they do not think it as yet. Will the time come when they will think it?” And in the “_Era Nuova_” he continues:—Man “sought illusions and found them. The brute knows not that he will die: the man said to himself that he knows he will not die. So they again came to be like each other.... And thenceforth Death being denied, no longer received from man his sad and entire assent. Man feared not to sadden his fellow, feared not to kill him, feared not to kill himself, because he no longer felt the Irreparable. I know the _Peisithanatos_ (Death-persuader) who it is. I know who persuaded man to violate life in himself and in others. It is he, who, in our souls, first violated Death.... This is light. Science is beneficent in that in which she is said to have failed. She has confirmed the sanction of Death. She has sealed up the tombs again.... The proof, moved against her, is her boast. Or rather it will be when from this negation the poet-priest shall have drawn the moral essence. Who can imagine the words by which we shall feel ourselves whirling through space? by which we shall feel ourselves mortal? We know this and that: we do not feel it. The day we feel it ... we shall be better. And we shall be sadder. But do you not see that it is exactly by his sadness that man differs from the brute beasts? And that to advance in sadness is to advance in humanity?...