ted;
Lay in my loving hands your head:
Then back shall come your peace departed,
Through the world's baseness long since fled;
And deep from out your heart upspringing,
Love's downy wings will soar to view,
The darling smiles like magic bringing
Around your gloomy lips anew.

Come, rest: myself will here detain you,
So long as pulse of mine shall beat;
Nor shall my heart grow cold and pain you,
Till carried to your last retreat.
You gaze at me in doubting fashion,
Before the offered rapture dumb;
Tears and still tears your sole expression:
Bedew my bosom with them--come!

EDMONDO DE AMICIS

(1846-)

In 1869, 'Vita Militare' (Military Life), a collection of short stories,
was perhaps the most popular Italian volume of the year. Read alike in
court and cottage, it was everywhere discussed and enthusiastically
praised. Its prime quality was that quivering sympathy which insures
some success to any imaginative work, however crudely written. But these
sketches of all the grim and amusing phases of Italian soldier life are
drawn with an exquisite precision. The reader feels the breathless
discouragement of the tired soldiers when new dusty vistas are revealed
by a sudden turn in the road ('A Midsummer March'); understands the
strong silent love between officer and orderly, suppressed by military
etiquette ('The Orderly'); smiles with the soldiers at the pretty
runaway boy, idol of the regiment ('The Son of the Regiment'); pities
the humiliations of the conscript novice ('The Conscript'); thrills with
the proud sorrow of the old man whose son's colonel tells the story of
his heroic death ('Dead on the Field of Battle'). "When I had finished
reading it," said an Italian workman, "I would gladly have pressed the
hand of the first soldier whom I happened to meet." The author was only
twenty-three, and has since given the world many delightful volumes, but
nothing finer.

These sketches were founded upon personal knowledge, for De Amicis began
life as a soldier. After his early education at Coni and Turin, he
entered the military school at Modena, from which he was sent out as
sub-lieutenant in the third regiment of the line. He saw active service
in various expeditions against Sicilian brigands; and in the war with
Austria he fought at the battle of Custozza.

His literary power seems to have been early manifest; for in 1867