As will be seen from the foregoing sketch, Carducci is no easy-going poet. He bears out in his everyday work the dislike he has expressed at seeing the Lyric in dressing-gown and slippers, and has given us, in a little poem at the end of the “Rime Nuove,” his idea of what a poet should be—the true _poietes_ (ποιητής) of the Greeks. For him the poet is a great artificer, with muscles hardened into iron at his trade: he holds his head high, his neck is strong, his breast bare, his eye bright. Hardly do the birds begin to chirp, and the dawn to smile over the hills than he, with his bellows, rouses the joy of the leaping flames in his smithy. Into the blazing furnace he throws the elements of love and thought, and the memories and glory of his fathers and his people. Past and future does he fuse in the incandescent mass. Then with his hammer he works it on the anvil, and in the splendour of the newly risen sun, sings as he fashions swords to strive for liberty, wreaths to crown victory and glory, and diadems to deck out beauty. “And for himself the poor workman makes a golden arrow, which he shoots towards the sun: his eye follows its shining upward flight, follows it and rejoices, and desires nothing more.” GIOVANNI PASCOLI THOROUGHLY Italian and of the best period is Pascoli in the exquisite propriety of his words; in the sharpness with which he outlines the little pictures, which are characteristic, especially, of his earlier work. In these respects one feels his close affinity with the Latin poets—above all Virgil—who are his Gods, and from whom the early Italian poets immediately derive. Less Italian—using the word in the stereotyped sense which would exclude Leopardi altogether from Italian song—less Italian is he in the mode and direction of his thought. No gay love-songs, no easy sentimentality have come from his pen: the passion of love is in fact strangely absent from his work. He is a child not so much of Italy, as of his age, in his attitude of enquiry towards the great questions of life and death; in the gravity, the earnestness resulting, especially in his later works, from this attitude. Nor is this individuality to be wondered at; for Pascoli’s muse was cradled in sorrow. He was but a lad when his father, returning home, among the hills of Romagna and within sight of the mediæval republic of S. Marino, was treacherously murdered by an unknown hand. His mother died not very long after, having never really recovered from the shock; then three brothers and a sister; so that Giovanni found himself at a very early age head of a family of a brother and two sisters. A hard struggle enabled him to form a home for them. One of the little poems to his mother which mark, year after year, the anniversary of her death, refers to this struggle as follows:—