"Not being allowed to use the pencil, I have used the pen.
And precisely on this account my pen resembles too much a
pencil; precisely on this account I am often too much of a
naturalist, and am too fond of losing myself in minute
details. I am as one who in walking goes leisurely along, and
stops every minute to observe the dash of light that breaks
through the trees of the woods, the insect that alights on
his hand, the leaf that falls on his head, a cloud, a wave, a
streak of smoke; in fine, the thousand accidents that make
creation so rich, so various, so poetical, and beyond which
we evermore catch glimpses of that grand mysterious
something, eternal, immense, benignant, and never inhuman nor
cruel, as some would have us believe, which is called God."

The selections are from Howells's 'Modern Italian Poets,' copyright
1887, by Harper and Brothers.

COWARDS

/*
In the deep circle of Siddim hast thou seen,
Under the shining skies of Palestine,
The sinister glitter of the Lake of Asphalt?
Those coasts, strewn thick with ashes of damnation,
Forever foe to every living thing,
Where rings the cry of the lost wandering bird
That on the shore of the perfidious sea
Athirsting dies,--that watery sepulchre
Of the five cities of iniquity,
Where even the tempest, when its clouds hang low,
Passes in silence, and the lightning dies,--
If thou hast seen them, bitterly hath been
Thy heart wrung with the misery and despair
Of that dread vision!
Yet there is on earth
A woe more desperate and miserable,--
A spectacle wherein the wrath of God
Avenges Him more terribly. It is
A vain, weak people of faint-heart old men,
That, for three hundred years of dull repose,
Has lain perpetual dreamer, folded in
The ragged purple of its ancestors,
Stretching its limbs wide in its country's sun,
To warm them; drinking the soft airs of autumn
Forgetful, on the fields where its forefathers
Like lions fought! From overflowing hands,
Strew we with hellebore and poppies thick
The way.

From 'The Primal Histories.'

THE HARVESTERS

What time in summer, sad with so much light,
The sun beats ceaselessly upon the fields;
The harvesters, as famine urges them,
Draw hitherward in