; while in one or two instances they allow
patent blunders to pass uncorrected. In the sonnet entitled 'A Dio'
(D'Ancona, vol. i. p. 102), for example, _bocca_ stands for _buca_ in a
place where sense and rhyme alike demand the restitution of the right
word.

At no time could the book have hoped for many readers. Least of all
would it have found them among the Italians of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, to whom its energetic language and unfamiliar
conceptions would have presented insuperable difficulties. Between
Dante and Alfieri no Italian poet except Michael Angelo expressed so
much deep thought and feeling in phrases so terse, and with originality
of style so daring; and even Michael Angelo is monotonous in the range
of his ideas and uniform in his diction, when compared with the
indescribable violence and vigour of Campanella. Campanella borrows
little by way of simile or illustration from the outer world, and he
never falls into the commonplaces of poetic phraseology. His poems
exhibit the exact opposite of the Petrarchistic or the Marinistic
mannerism. Each sonnet seems to have been wrenched alive and
palpitating from the poet's heart. There is no smoothness, no gradual
unfolding of a theme, no rhetorical exposition, no fanciful embroidery,
no sweetness of melodic cadence, in his masculine art of poetry.
Brusque, rough, violent in transition, leaping from the sublime to the
ridiculous--his poems owe their elevation to the intensity of their
feeling, the nobleness and condensation of their thought, the energy
and audacity of their expression, their brevity, sincerity, and weight
of sentiment. Campanella had an essentially combative intellect. He was
both a poet and a philosopher militant. He stood alone, making war upon
the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in state-craft,
and of Petrarch in art, taking the fortresses of phrase by storm, and
subduing the hardest material of philosophy to the tyranny of his
rhymes. Plebeian saws, salient images, dry sentences of metaphysical
speculation, logical summaries, and fiery tirades are hurled together--
half crude and cindery scoriae, half molten metal and resplendent ore--
from the volcano of his passionate mind. Such being the nature of
Campanella's style, when in addition it is remembered that his text is
sometimes hopelessly corrupt and his allusions obscure, the
difficulties offered by his sonnets to the translator will be readily
conceived