in the green blackness of the tangled wood,
and breathes a rich melancholy, as if,
when day is done,
A nightingale from bough to bough were singing.
The sonnets addressed to the more recent poets, his fellow-countrymen, seem mainly to have served as vents for Carducci's own indignation at the literary and political degeneracy of the present time. Many of them are from among the poet's earlier productions, and the changes which have occurred since their writing make them seem to belong already to a past period when perhaps more than at present his severe reflections on his country and countrymen were deserved. A foreigner can hardly enter into the bitterness of vituperation which finds utterance in such poems as those “In Santa Croce” [XXVIII], or “The Voice of the Priests” [XXIX], the sonnet addressed to Vittorio Alfieri [XXV],
O de l'italo agon supremo atleta,
and that to Goldoni, the “Terence of the Adria”; but all of these, which we may call the literary sonnets, have a certain universal value in that they reflect more than individual feeling. Each poet addressed is identified in some way with the nation's weal or woe; and the soul of the patriot, and no mere dilettante admiration, is what pours forth those fervid utterances which, in another tongue and to the ear of strangers, will naturally often seem overwrought.
No less truly does the soul of the father speak in the beautiful verses “On my Daughter's Marriage,” and the soul of manly friendship in that little song “At the Table of a Friend,” which seems as if it had dropped from the pages of Horace like a purple grape from the cluster all odorous with its bloom.
Over all others in stern and majestic portraiture rise those verses, both of the earlier and later period, in which Carducci treats of Dante and his influence. Nowhere are we more impressed than here with the strange fascination of that man who