d of fostering superstition, taught
us to read Alfieri. But as I read the codices of the fourteenth
century, the ideas of the Renaissance began to appear to me in the
gilded initial letters like the eyes of nymphs in the midst of
flowers, and between the lines of the spiritual _laude_ I detected the
Satanic strophe."

So long had Italy lived in passive dependence on the fame of her great
writers of the times of Augustus and of the Medici, and in the apathy
of a long-abandoned hope of political independence and achievement,
that it required a man of powerful instinct and genius to rouse the
people to a sense of their actual possession of a national life and of
a literature that is not alone of the past, and so to throw off both
the "livery of the slave and the mask of the courtesan." Such was the
mission of Carducci. As Howells in his 'Modern Italian Poets' remarks
of Leopardi:--"He seems to have been the poet of the national mood; he
was the final expression of that hopeless apathy in which Italy lay
bound for thirty years after the fall of Napoleon and his
governments." So it may be said of Carducci that in him speaks the
hope and joy of a nation waking to new life, and recalling her past
glories, no longer with shame but a purpose to prove herself worthy of
such a heritage.

A distinguished literary contemporary, Enrico Panzacchi, says of
Carducci:--

"I believe that I do not exaggerate the importance of Carducci when I
say that to him and to his perseverance and steadfast work we owe in
great part the poetic revival in Italy."

Cesar Lombroso, in the Paris Revue des Revues, says:--"Among the stars
of first magnitude shines one of greatest brilliance, Carducci, the
true representative of Italian literary genius."

The poem that first attracted attention and caused no little flutter
of ecclesiastical gowns was the 'Hymn to Satan,' which appeared in
1865 in Pistoja, over the signature "Enotrio Romaho," and bore the
date "MMDCXVIII from the foundation of Rome." It is not indeed the
sacrilegious invective that might be imagined from the title, but
rather a hymn to Science and to Free Thought, liberated from the
ancient thraldom of dogma and superstition. It reveals the strong
Hellenic instinct which still survives in the Italian people beneath
the superimposed Christianity, and which here, as in many other of
Carducci's poems, stands out in bold contrast with the subjective and
spiritual elements in religion. It is