It is perhaps in the quiet intimateness of “_La Sementa_” that the fundamental difference between the classic inspiration of Pascoli and that of the older poet Carducci is epitomised. Carducci is a born polemist. Son of the _Risorgimento_, he passed his youth in the midst of a great epic movement, stigmatizing shams and tyrants with the resources which a wide vocabulary placed at the disposal of an exceptionally energetic and enthusiastic nature. Carducci’s classicism is to a great extent formal. His verse imitates the Horatian metres, his periods are often more Latin than Italian in their construction, his women bear Latin names. And this Latin brevity, this careful exclusion of all superfluous words, this precision in the use of the smaller parts of speech (Carducci’s prepositions are a study in themselves) combined with the broad imagery and ample conception that seem inseparable from the age of Garibaldi, provoke in the reader a sense of exquisite form and of impressive grandeur. The grandeur, however, sometimes degenerates into rhetoric. Pascoli is more reflective; he has more quiet sentiment. He lives in a quieter age, when the enthusiastic hopefulness of the _Risorgimento_ has found its reaction in a feeling of despondency concerning the accomplished reality. He is in no sense of the word a polemist. The form of his verse and of his period is Italian, though he has, it is true, revived the Latin meaning of many Italian words. He has less grandeur than Carducci, but on the other hand he is never rhetorical. The Latin spirit has taken such complete possession of him that it has become part of himself; it leavens his whole work, but leaves it strictly individual in form and conception, and admits the expression of a sense of mystery and vagueness which is rather of the romantic than of the classic mind. As illustrative of the difference in conception between the two poets we may compare their sonnets to “_The Ox_.” THE OX. (PASCOLI.) At the narrow brook, amid uncertain mists gazes the wide-eyed ox: in the plain far stretching to a sea that recedes ever, go the blue waters of a river: loom large before his eyes, in the misty light, the willow and the alder; wanders a flock upon the grass, now here now there, and seems the herd of an ancient god. Shadows with talons spread broad wings in the air: mutely chimeras move like clouds in the deep sky: the sun goes down, immense, behind huge mountains: already lengthen, black, the larger shades of a much larger world. THE OX. (CARDUCCI.) Oh pious ox, I love thee; and a gentle feeling of vigour and of peace thou pour’st into my heart; whether, solemn as a monument, thou gazest at the field so free and fruitful, or whether, bowing gladly to the yoke, the agile work of man thou gladly aidest; he pricks and urges thee and thou repliest with the slow turning of thy patient eye.