These extracts will enable the reader to form an idea of the power of thought and depth of feeling that characterise Leopardi's Poems, although the beauty of his diction may not be reproduced in all its purity and sweetness. Never was there a poet who knew how to handle the Italian language with greater skill, or to give it more enchanting melody or more varied cadences. If he has a fault, it is that he is sometimes too indifferent to ornament, and that his simplicity now and then degenerates into poverty and bareness. But when we remember what Italian poetry had become in his time, how artificial, how overladen with meretricious ornaments, we shall think him worthy of praise, rather than deserving of censure. His earlier poems are the most ornate, and it was only by degrees that he attained that crystal clearness of style for which we find no parallel in the Italian language. His frequent use of a capricious succession of rhymed and unrhymed lines allows him to develop his thoughts with perfect freedom; indeed, so easy is the metre, that were it not for his happy selection of words and exquisite variety of cadence, it would border dangerously on the slipshod; indeed, it does so in the works of his imitators, and of recent years it has been, probably for that reason, abandoned by poets in favour of systems more rigid and perhaps more epigrammatic.
Leopardi had every characteristic of a great lyric poet. If his pessimism is sometimes too pronounced for many readers, it must be admitted that the evils of life are sufficiently numerous to justify his elegies; and he atones for any excess of gloom by the most exquisite pictures of nature and of love. The world appears more beautiful, though more terribly and darkly beautiful, in his poems than in reality. He has a rare power of musical diction which delights the ear even in his most melancholy passages. Indeed, the secret of his power lies in the unique and exquisite contrast between the gloom and bitterness of his thoughts and the sweetness and radiant beauty of his style.
He has also the rare power of concentrating in a few lines a whole world of thought and emotion. Thus, in the Risorgimento:
"Meco ritorna a vivere
La piaggia, il bosco, il monte;
Parla al mio core il fonte,
Meco favella il mar.
In the poem To Sylvia quoted above, he calls her "his hope so much bewailed," "mia lacrimata speme." In the Ricordanze he calls Nerina "his eternal sigh." Numerous other instances could be adduced. Take, for example, the lovely passage in the Canto Notturno, where the shepherd apostrophizes the Moon:
"Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina,
Che si pensosa sei, tu forse intendi,
Questo viver terreno,
Il patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia;
Che sia questo morir, questo supremo
Scolorar del sembiante,
E perir della terra, e venir meno
Ad ogni usata, amante compagnia."
His pathos and tenderness, expressed in language of the most perfect purity and sweetness, and adorned with the rainbow hues of his vivid imagination, produce an effect more poetical than words can describe. I know of no lyric poet who keeps the mind of his reader under a more potent spell. Others, like Horace and Alfred de Musset, may be more entertaining, others, again, like Keats and Shelley, may delight us with airier and more brilliant flights of fancy, but Leopardi leads us to the brink of abysses and shows us their unfathomable depth.
He always writes from his heart, a rare quality, for we may find twenty poets who write from the head for one who writes from the heart. He never attempts a task for which he is unfitted. His powers of reasoning in verse are very great, but his argument never becomes unpoetical, never becomes dryly didactic. If his works have a fault, it is that now and then the poems have a tendency to fall off towards the end, and in his later works there is a certain languor of style, probably the result of ill-health. He is a great master of blank verse, and only in one of the poems in that metre, the Palinodia, does he become heavy and prolix. Sometimes, when he is not sustained by any great thought, his extreme simplicity degenerates into poverty. Very few poets could venture to be as simple as Leopardi.
His works have the effect of growing upon the reader. The second perusal pleases better than the first, and the more they are read, the more they are admired. In quantity of verse produced, he is surpassed by many writers; but in quality, by none.
His prose works, like his poems, are few in number and short in dimension. They comprise dialogues (a form of which he was very fond), a few essays, and over one hundred detached fragmentary thoughts. They make only a small volume of most unimposing bulk, but the beauties of thought and style are so great that many critics have extolled them as the most perfect production of Italian prose. They all set forth his pessimism and his melancholy, but with so much art and variety, that while they convince us of the world's misery, they also enchant us with its beauty. Leopardi made a profound study of the great prose writers of the Fourteenth Century, and he alone succeeds in reproducing to perfection the freshness and harmony of their style. Some passages are so magnificent that they cry out aloud to be put into verse. In his prose we find less of his heart (that wonderful heart that embraced the whole world in its sympathy) and more of the vivacity of his fancy than in his verse.