The song of the reapers, long, distant, mournful and wearied—
a line which can only tell its full tale of tender sadness in the original:
il canto
de mietitori, longo, lontano, piangevole, stanco—
how the sun looks down
like a cyclops heavy with wine—
and we are then as suddenly awakened out of our delicious reverie by the screaming of a peacock and a bat's wing grazing our head, we know that the poetry is real not by its mere accuracy of description, but by the feeling that it awakens as only nature itself could awaken it.
The “Summer Dream” recalls, in the vividness and delicacy of its landscape and tenderness of feeling, perhaps more of Dante than of the ancient poets. There is a vision of the mother walking with the poet's little brother by the river bank,
the happy mother walking in the sunlight,
which suggests Dante's glimpse of the Countess Matilda in the daisy-sprinkled meadow, described in the twenty-eighth canto of the “Purgatory.” The bells of Easter-eve are telling from a high tower that