this struggle of the pagan
against the Christian instinct that accounts for the commingled
sentiment of awe and of rebellion with which Carducci contemplates his
great master Dante; for while he must revere him as the founder of
Italian letters and the immortal poet of his race, he cannot but see
both in the spirituality of Dante's conception of the Church and in
his absolute loyalty to the Empire, motives wholly foreign to the
ancient national instinct. Referring again to his transition years, he
writes:

"Meanwhile the shadow of Dante looked down reproachfully upon me; but
I might have answered:--'Father and Master, why didst thou bring
learning from the cloister to the piazza, from the Latin to the vulgar
tongue? Thou first, O great public accuser of the Middle Ages, gavest
the signal for the rebound of thought. That the alarm was sounded from
the bells of a Gothic campanile mattered but little.'"

Without a formal coronation, Carducci may be regarded as the actual
poet laureate of Italy. He is still, at sixty years of age, an active
and hard-working professor at the University of Bologna, where his
popularity with his students in the lecture-room is equal to that
which his writings have gained throughout the land. A favorite with
the Court, and often invited to lecture before the Queen, he is still
a man of great simplicity, even to roughness, of manners, and of a
genial and cordial nature. Not only do the Italians with one voice
call him their greatest author, but many both in Italy and elsewhere
are fain to consider him the foremost living poet in Europe.

The citations here given have been selected as illustrating the
prominent features of Carducci's genius. His joy in mental
emancipation from the thraldom of dogma and superstition is seen in
the 'Roma' and in the 'Hymn to Satan.' His paganism and his "cult of
form," as also his Homeric power of description and of color, are seen
in 'The Ox' and in 'To Aurora.' His veneration for the great masters
finds expression in the sonnets to Homer and Dante, and the revulsion
of the pagan before the spiritual religious feeling is shown in the
lines 'In a Gothic Church' and in the sonnet 'Dante.'

The poems of Carducci have appeared for the most part in the following
editions only:--'Poesie,' embracing the 'Juvenilia,' 'Levia Gravia,'
and the 'Decennali'; 'Nuove Poesie,' 'Odi Barbare,' 'Nuove Rime.'
Zanichelli in Bologna publishes a complete edition of his writings.
H