of the new notions, and despised and trampled upon the study of Italian; his own original papers were like mere translations from the French: he had then wallowed in the reading, which he had since learned to detest.* Thus, by the native and maturing force of his own taste and judgment, and without a guide, he had revolted against the bad rules of his youthful training, and framed a sound and true system for himself at an age when in ordinary minds, even with the aid of the best instructors, taste and judgment in letters are but beginning faintly to dawn.

32. As we have seen, his first efforts were applied to philology; and it was not till he was seventeen and a half rather an advanced period in his early ripened mental life-that he gave himself to literature in its ordinary sense. It was probably not so much choice, as necessity, that threw him upon the former line of study. Not that he had great advantages for it; but the reverse. The merits of his father's library have apparently been exaggerated by Ranieri; it did not, for example, contain a Xenophon. Still it was a library, and it had no modern books; and being thus thrown upon the dead languages, and having for the most part to learn them by means of reading their authors, his acquisitive mind was naturally drawn to their speech, and to its laws.

33. We are inclined to trace to this circumstance the accuracy and beauty of his own diction and his admirable style. He had handled early and familiarly those among all the instruments for the expansion of thought, which are the most rigorously adapted to the laws of thought; and he had also deeply considered the mode and form of the adaptation. Yet it is certainly wonderful that he

* Op. V. p. 23, p. 174.

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should have issued from these studies not only a refined scholar and philologian, but a powerful and lofty poet; as well as that he should have carried to maturity, in the most fervid and impatient period of life, pursuits which are commonly considered rather dry. But it is a cardinal truth, that no study whatever can be dry to such a mind when earnestly embracing it.

We should gladly have noticed his other labours in Italian, particularly his commentary upon Petrarch, to the merits of which very competent testimony might be quoted; but the expenditure of space warns us to pass on. We advance the more readily because even to do this would not be to do all; for, besides the great things that he accomplished, he had already cast in the mould of Thought the plans of more and greater.*

34. When we regard Leopardi in his character of a poetin which no Italian of the present generation, we conceive, except Manzoni, even approaches him, and he in a different order, and perhaps but in a single piece-it is not difficult to perceive that he was endowed in a peculiar degree with most of the faculties, which belong to the highest excellence. We shall note two exceptions. The first is the solid and consistent wisdom which can feel no other firm foundation in the heart of man than the Gospel revelation without which, even while we feel the poet to be an enchanter, we cannot accept and trust him as a guide and of which Wordsworth is an example unequalled probably in our age, and unsurpassed in any age preceding ours. Nor let it be said that this is not properly a poetical defect; because the highest functions of the human being stand in such intimate relations to

* Epistolario, II. p. 126. To Colletta.

one another, that the patent want of any one of them will commonly prevent the attainment of perfection in any other. The sense of beauty enters into the highest philosophy, as in Plato. The highest poet must be a philosopher, accomplished, like Dante, or intuitive, like Shakspeare. But neither the one nor the other can now exist in separation from that conception of the relations between God and man, that new standard and pattern of humanity, which Christianity has supplied. It is true, indeed, that much of what it has indelibly impressed upon the imagination and understanding, the heart and life of man, may be traceable and even prominent in those who individually disown it. The splendour of these disappropriated gifts in particular cases may be among the very greatest of the signs and wonders appointed for the trial of faith. Yet there is always something in them to show that they have with them no source of positive and permanent vitality: that the branch has been torn from the tree, and that its life is on the wane.

35. There is another point, in which Leopardi fails as compared with the highest poets. He is stronger in the reflective than in the perceptive, or at any rate than in the more strictly creative powers. Perhaps these latter were repressed in their growth by the severe realities of his life. It is by them that the poet projects his work from himself, stands as it were completely detached from it, and becomes in his own personality invisible. Thus did Homer and Shakspeare perhaps beyond all other men: thus did Goethe, subjective as he truly is: thus did Dante when he pleased, although his individuality is the local and material, not the formal, centre, to so speak, of his whole poem. All this is only to say in other words that by this gift the poet throws his entire

strength into his work, and identifies himself with it; that he not only does, but for the time being is, his work; and that then, when the work is done, he passes away and leaves it. It is perfect in its own kind, and bears no stamp or trace of him—that is of what in him pertains to the individual as such, and does not come under the general laws of truth and beauty. Thus all high pictorial poetry is composed: thus every great character, in the drama or romance, is conceived and executed.

36. It is the gift of imagination in its highest form and intensity which effects these wonderful transmutations, and places the poet of the first order in a rank, nearer to that of creative energies than anything else we know. Next, perhaps, to him comes the great intuitive discoverer. These are the few and privileged children of Nature, who tread a royal road, and constitute the signal exceptions to that broad and general law of human knowledge: Homo, naturæ minister et interpres, tantum facit et intelligit quantum de naturæ ordine re vel mente observaverit: nec amplius scit, aut potest. (Bacon, Nov. Org., Aph. I.)

37. Leopardi, though he had abundance both of fancy and of imagination, either was not possessed of this peculiar form of the latter gift or had not developed it: his impersonations are beautiful, but rather after the manner of statues: they have just so much of life as is sufficient to put his metaphysical conceptions in motion; but we always seem to discover his hand propping them up and moving them on: they have not the flesh-and-blood reality he is eminently a subjective poet, and the reader never loses him from view. But he is surely a very great subjective poet, and applies to his work, with a power rarely equalled, all the resources of thought and passion, all that his introspective habits had taught him he has

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choice and flowing diction, a profound harmony, intense pathos: and he unites to very peculiar grace a masculine energy and even majesty of expression, which is not surpassed, so far as we know, in the whole range of poetry or of eloquence, and which indeed gives the highest evidence of its prerogative by endowing sentiments, now become trite and almost vulgar through use, with perfect freshness of aspect and with the power to produce lively and strong impressions. Of this some examples may be noticed in the extracts we are about to make. His gift of compression, in particular, is one which seems, not borrowed, for such things no man can borrow they are marked "not transferable "—but descended or inherited from the greatest of all masters of compression, from Dante himself.

38. Although it has appeared that his first poetical efforts were relatively late, yet they were as early as those of most poets who have acquired particular celebrity for juvenile productions, and they will bear, we imagine, favourable comparison with those of Pope or of Milton. Indeed, as their beginning and maturity were almost simultaneous, he is really no less remarkable as a youthful poet than as a youthful scholar and critic, and holds one of the very first places in the troop of beardless Apollos. Nothing to our minds can be more beautiful than his first effort; the piece entitled Il Primo Amore, in that purely and perhaps inalienably Italian measure, the terza rima. It is so even a tissue of harmonious thought and language, that we have laboured in vain to discover how to do it justice by an extract. But, rather than pass it by altogether, we will quote the passage which begins by describing the superior and subtler force that drew him away from his first love, his studies.