The “Hymn to Satan,” published for the first time in 1865 at Pistoia under the pseudonym of “Enotrio Romano,” may be said, indeed, to be the beginning of his fame. Launched on the world without any explanation, the misleading title caused it to be understood only by a few careful readers. The world at large saw in it, according to the opinion of one critic, “an intellectual orgy,” a blasphemous rebellion against everything that the nation, and even the world, had hitherto considered sacred and necessary for the existence of society. Its publication excited great controversy, afterwards given to the world under the title of the “Polemiche Sataniche,” which gave Carducci the opportunity of responding to the attacks of the critics, and explaining the intimate sense of the poem; but even after his explanations, even when we know from his own lips that for him, taking up, as he believes, the standpoint of the modern Roman Catholic Church, “Satan is beauty, love, wellbeing, happiness”; that “Satan is thought that flies, science that experiments, the heart that blazes up, the forehead on which is written ‘I will not abase myself’; that Satanic were the revolutions that brought men out of the middle ages; Satanic the Italian communes; the German Reformation; Holland embodying liberty in deed; England vindicating and avenging it; France spreading it abroad to all orders and all peoples,”—even after the poet himself has told us this, the poem still jars in many places for the unwonted violence of its expressions. It is a battle-hymn, with all the fire and energy of the battle-charge in it. The metre rushes like the swift running of horses, sweeping the reader along with irresistible force. The poem opens with the following invocation:— “Towards thee, boundless principle of being, matter and spirit, reason and sense, whilst the wine sparkles in the cups like the soul in the eye; while the earth and sun smile and interchange words of love, and a murmur of mysterious nuptials runs through the mountains, and the fruitful plain palpitates,—towards thee does the bold verse break forth; I invoke thee, O Satan, king of the feast. Away, O priest, with your aspersorium and your chant! No, priest, Satan turns not back. See, rust eats away Michael’s mystic brand; and the faithful archangel, plucked of his feathers, falls into space. Cold is the thunderbolt in Jehovah’s hand. Like pallid meteors, extinguished planets, do the angels rain down from the firmaments. In never-sleeping matter, king of phenomena, king of forms, Satan lives alone.”