his programme for the future in pages that will remain
amongst the noblest and most powerful of contemporary literature. From
that time Carducci appears in a new form, evolved afterwards in his last
Odes, _Il Piemonte_, _Li Bicocca di San Giacomo_, the Ode to the
daughter of Francesco Crispi on her marriage, and the one to the church
where Dante once prayed, _Alla Chiesetta dei Polenta_, which is like the
withdrawing into itself of a warlike soul weary of its battle.

For a few months in 1876 Carducci had a seat in the Italian Chamber. In
1881 he was appointed a member of the higher council of education. In
1890 he was made a senator. And in 1906 he was awarded the Nobel prize
for literature. He died at Bologna on the 16th of February 1907. By his
marriage in 1859 he had two daughters, who survived him, and one son,
who died in infancy.

The same qualities which placed Carducci among the classics of Italy in
his earlier days remained consistently with him in later life. His
thought flows limpid, serene, sure of itself above an undercurrent of
sane and vigorous if pagan philosophy. Patriotism, the grandeur of work,
the soul-satisfying power of justice, are the poet's dominant ideals.
For many years the national struggle for liberty had forced the best
there was in heart and brain into the atmosphere of political intrigue
and from one battlefield to another; Carducci therefore found a poetry
emasculated by the deviation into other channels of the intellectual
virility of his country. On this mass of patriotic doggerel, of sickly,
languishing sentimentality as insincere as it was inane, he grafted a
poetry not often tender, but always violently felt and thrown into a
mould of majestic form; not always quite expected or appreciated by his
contemporaries, but never commonplace in structure; always high in tone
and free in spirit. The adaptation of various kinds of Latin metres to
the somewhat sinewless language he found at his disposal, whilst it
might have been an effort of mere pedantry in another, was a life-giving
and strengthening inspiration in his case. Another of his
characteristics, which made him peculiarly precious to his countrymen,
is the fact that his poems form a kind of lyric record of the Italian
struggle for independence. The tumultuous vicissitudes of all other
nations, however, and the pageantry of the history of all times, have in
turns touched his particular order of imagination. The more important
par