“When, in the dark ilexes and new-flowered almond, revels the nuptial chorus of the birds, and the primroses on the sunny hills are eyes of old-world nymphs looking out on mortal men, and the sun greets the beds of flowers with youthful smile, and over the silent moor the sky bends piously, and the breath of April moves the flowering corn like a sigh of love stirring a young bride’s veil; then do the trunk of the vine and the heart of the maiden leap up with throbs; they feel their wounds. The vine breathes odorous buds into the cold twigs, the maiden darts desire in her virgin blushes. Everything ferments and grows languid in the tepor of the air: the blood within the veins, the wine within the casks. O, ruddy prisoner! thou yearnest for thy fatherland, and the breath of thy native hill raises a ferment within the tun. There is the joyous life of the vine twigs: here thou art a prisoner in the snare.... Hurrah for liberty! Let us go, let us go to liberate the captive; let us call him back to life and make him sparkle in the glass, sparkle on the crest of the hill, sparkle to the sunlight; let the light breeze kiss him again; let him behold the young vines.” And yet with all this revelling in nature, and especially the nature of spring-time, the melancholy despondent strain is never far distant. Even in the Greek spring songs there is nearly as much talk of chill mist and rain as of clear sky and sunlight; and the third song, the Alexandrine, goes so far as to even introduce a graveyard. In the little poem entitled “School Memories,” too, the poet, after describing the priest, makes a charming picture of the summer landscape and beckoning trees that he sees through the window: but everything is suddenly crossed and darkened by the thought of “death, and the formless nothing,” and this thought of death has haunted him ever since. He is too fond of graveyards; too apt, like some German poets at the beginning of last century, to look upon the world as a vast cemetery. It is perhaps to this same strain of pessimism, this same tendency to look at the ugly side of things, that we are to attribute the absolute repulsiveness of many of the images he employs. To compare trees, bald, dripping, and bent, to sextons over a grave is hardly poetical, but it is at any rate harmless; some of his other similitudes are too repulsive for translation, and we must think it a pity that so great a poet should encourage the tendency to dwell, quite gratuitously, on disagreeable non-poetical subjects. Perhaps the poems which are most free from these defects are those contained in the first volume of the “Odi Barbare.” There we find the exquisite little piece entitled “Fantasia.”