Count all mankind as born confederates,
And embrace all with unfeigned love,
Rendering and expecting strong and ready succour
In the changing perils and the anguishes
Of the common warfare.[41]
Man in the grip of Nature is like the anthill crushed by a chance-falling apple, and the lava field of Vesuvius, covering extinct cities, where but the broom plant sheds a forlorn fragrance, aptly symbolizes the desolate earth he is doomed to tread. While this earth itself, a vanishing film of vapour in the universe, traverses by its insignificance his dream of immortality. And his humorous irony sports, in the prose dialogues, with this annihilating disparity between man’s pretensions and the truth.[42]
Yet the effect of Leopardi’s work—and especially of his poetry—is at many points subtly to rectify his desperate view of the world. He cannot suppress the uprush of pity for those whose career in it is prematurely cut short, however his reason may persuade him that they are fortunate.[43] The noble pathos of the Attic grave monuments, representing, for instance, a young girl in the act of taking leave of her friends, overpowers the reflections of his philosophy, and he wrestles in moving verses with the enigma:
Ah me! why at the end
Of paths so grievous, not ordain at least
A happy goal? But rather robe in gloom