Neither is Carducci alone in his attempts to adapt Latin measures to Italian verse. Other poets (among them Chiabrera) had written _Poesia Barbara_ before him, and his contemporary Cavallotti has tried it too; but they have produced _Poesia Barbara_ of a different kind. The essential difference between these poets and Carducci lies in this: that whereas they copied the mechanism of the Latin metre, with its complicated system of long and short syllables, Carducci, with finer intuition of the genius of his mother-tongue, has aimed at catching and reproducing the music, the rhythm of the Latin verse. He is hence no copyist but a musician of most delicate ear, whose keen sense of harmony has procured him success where others have failed, and are likely to fail miserably. Modern Italian is not fitted, any more than modern English, for the formal construction of verse on the basis of long and short feet,—on the basis, that is, of metre. Indeed many Italian critics think that even in Latin this form of verse-construction was gradually giving way, or assimilating itself to the rhythmical verse—the verse whose movement struck the ear, as does the rhythm of music or dance, without awakening grammatical considerations of length or shortness of syllables. It is this reproduction of rhythm instead of metre that renders Carducci so eminently and pleasurably readable where other poets, even great ones, are insupportable. All readers of Tennyson, for instance, know the rage with which one tries to infuse a little music into his “experiments.” One struggles with “Boadicea,” trying vainly to discover some sort of melody in it, but, on coming to such a line as this— “Mad and maddening, all that heard her in her fierce volubility,” really throws away the book in utter despair. Not so with Carducci. It is rare to find a harsh verse in his work, though such, of course, do occur here and there, and the ease with which his poetry can be translated into Latin (as much of it has been) proves its close affinity with this language.[19]