Man, embrace your destiny! Man, resign yourself to be man! Think in your furrow, do not rave. Love—think it—is not only the sweetest but the most tremendous of actions: it is adding new fuel to the great pyre that flames in the darkness of our night.” Many will not agree with Pascoli’s method of arriving at his conclusions; for men’s minds are infinite in number, and but few think alike. But all will recognise the reverent earnestness of his belief, and respect the man whom hatred has moulded into a fervent apostle of love. To understand Pascoli’s power of differentiating character and handling dialogue, we must turn, not to his Italian, but to his Latin poems. These are not in any sense of the word academic exercises: they are instinct with life and of extraordinary vivacity. The crowd in which the laughing Horace finds himself wedged, in the “_Reditus Augusti_”—the poetical rivalry in the tavern between Catullus and Calvus, in the “_Catullo Calvos_”—the witty yet serious discussion between Mæcenas, Varius, Virgil and Plotius in the “_Cena in Caudiano Nervæ_”—these are charming in the extreme, and have all the piquancy of the Horatian satire. The other two poems, “_Jugurtha_” and “_Castanea_,” are of a different stamp. The first is a powerful conception of the ravings and sufferings of the blinded Numidian king, in the Roman dungeon where he dies of hunger and thirst; the second is a description of the gathering and preparation of the chestnut crops, with an invocation to the tree on which alone the inhabitants of the Tuscan Apennines depend for warmth and food in winter. The peasant household is truly Virgilian in the conciseness and sympathy with which it is presented. Truly Virgilian, too, is an Italian poem entitled “_La Sementa_” (The Sowing) published in the “_Poemetti_.” There is a simple dignity in all the actions and sayings of the peasants which prevents any feeling of the triviality which the poet might so easily have suggested; prevents at the same time that sentiment of unreality which enthusiastic and romantic writers on the subject are so apt to provoke.