Passing some half dozen poems, every way worthy of special notice, but omitted on account of our confined space, we come to “The Beggar of Naples.” This is one of the longest and most striking poems in the book; in a versification the most irregular but the most harmonious, indulging in the wildest flights of fancy, but never soaring beyond the common ken. The story is simple, and turns on the power with which a virtuous love may shape the destiny of the meanest. The picture of the beggars hanging round the sunny corners of the streets, tells with a few skillful touches more than a whole library of statistics.
“Avoiding every wintry shade,
The lazzaroni crawled to sunny spots;
At every corner miserable knots
Pursued their miserable trade,
And held the sunshine in their asking palms,
Which gave unthanked its glowing alms,
Thawing the blood until it ran
As wine within a vintage runs.”
The italicized lines are eminently suggestive; and in the contemplative mind, awaken a long train of the most solemn thoughts—thoughts of Heaven’s indiscriminate bounty, and man’s unthankful forgetfulness, of the beggar’s hands overflowing with the gifts of nature, but all empty of the gifts of churlish human charity. The listlessness of the beggar’s life, the vacant sense and brain of the purposeless idler, is admirably portrayed in the following lines:—