“A fine trained goshawk perched on the knight’s fist, and, when the hail struck the windows now here now there according to the shifting wind, and the swift-passing lightning whitened the flashing arms hanging on the walls, the bird beat its wings, stretching out its snakelike neck, and gave out a hoarse cry of joy: the love of his native, free Apuan heights burnt in his piercing eye; he longed, the noble bird, to direct his flight through the thunder athwart the clouds.” Diverse once more, yet none the less apt to remain impressed upon the memory, is the opening picture of the poem for the fifth anniversary of the battle of Mentana, where, it will be remembered, Garibaldi’s troops were defeated by the combined French and Papal forces:— “Every year when the sad hour of Mentana’s rout sounds over the conscious hills, plains and hills heave, and proudly upright stands the band of the dead on the tumuli of Nomentum. They are no hideous skeletons; they are tall and beautiful forms, around which waves the rosy veil of twilight: through their wounds laugh the pious, virgin stars; the clouds of the sky wreathe lightly round their locks.” No doubt it is Carducci’s classicism (in a poem entitled “Classicism and Romanticism” he holds up the latter to utter ridicule) which gives him this marked power of word-painting; it also informs his poem with a paganism of which we shall have presently to speak. Yet it is classicism deeply coloured by nineteenth-century life. Take, for instance, the little poem “Ruit Hora,” and see how the modern unrest comes across the calm of the classic scene. Horace’s Lydia would not have understood a lover of this sort for all his passion:— “O green solitude for which I have yearned, far from the noise of men! hither come two divine friends with us, O Lydia, Wine and Love. See how Lycæus, the eternal youth, laughs in the shining crystal: as in thine eyes, O glorious Lydia, Love rides in triumph and unbinds his eyes. The sun shines low through the trellis and breaks, rosy, against my glass; he glances and trembles golden among thy locks, O Lydia. Among the blackness of thy locks, O snowy Lydia, a pallid rose languishes, and a gentle sudden sadness tempers the fires of love in my heart. Tell me: why does the sea down there send up mysterious groanings under the flaming evening? What songs, O Lydia, do those pines sing to each other? See with what desire those hills stretch out their arms to the setting sun: the shadow grows and embraces them: it seems as though they were begging the last kiss, O Lydia. I beg thy kisses, if the shade envelops me, O Lycæus, giver of joy; I beg thine eyes, O shining Lydia, if Hyperion sinks. And time is rushing by. O rosy mouth, unclose! O flower of the soul, O flower of desire, open thy cup! O loved arms, open!”