Know—and perhaps thou dost know in the churchyard— the child with long gold ringlets and that other for whom thy last tear fell— know that I fostered them, that I adore them. For them I gathered up my shattered courage and I wiped clear my soul for them; they have a roof, they have a nest—my boast: my love it is that feeds them, and my toil. They are not happy, know it, but serene; theirs is the smile but of a pious sadness: I look on them—my sole, lone family— and ever to my eyes I feel there comes that last unfinished tear that wet thy lids in the death-agony. He now lives either at Messina, where he is Professor of Latin, or among the chestnut woods that clothe the hills round Barga near Lucca, with one of his sisters. This is Maria, the careful, winning housewife whom all readers of her brother’s poems love—herself known also in the world of letters as a graceful poetess and an accomplished Latin scholar. Two or three verses of the little poem entitled “_Sorella_” reflect the bond that unites them. I know not if she be to him more mother or more daughter, the sister, gently serious; she—sweet, and grave and pious— corrects, consoles and counsels; Presses his hair, embraces him care-burdened; speaks:—“_What is it?_” Conceals her face against his breast, Speaks, in confusion:—“_Know’st not?_” She keeps on her pale face and in her eyes quick glancing, ah! for when he leaves, the smile; the tears for his return. Two principal influences, then, have gone to the moulding of Pascoli’s genius: one, the potent attraction of the Augustan poets; the other, the shock, strain and struggle which have fixed his thoughts on the most painful problems of existence; which have, by the very breaking up of his home, accentuated the longing for the domestic affections above that for amorous passion; and have tinged the whole of his work with an autumn-like sadness. Both these influences reveal themselves in Pascoli’s first published work; a small volume of little poems entitled _Myricæ_, and bearing the legend _Arbusta juvant, humilesque myricæ_. The shock was at that time, however, still too near to have exerted its full influence on the poet’s character. It kept his mind fixed not so much on the philosophical as on the sentimental and physical side of death: on the churchyard with its cypresses, its driving showers and gleams of golden sunshine, its rainbow, its groups of merry children playing “Touch” round the great cross—but, also, with its dead lying through the long nights of rain and wind. Even here, however, where triteness would seem inevitable, Pascoli is individual. He never contemplates physical decay: worms and skulls are not so much as hinted at. It is the loneliness of his dead that rivets the poet’s thoughts, their vain longing for news of those they left on earth:—