'Library of the World's Best Literature.'

GIOSUE CARDUCCI

(1836-)

BY FRANK SEWALL

Rarely in the history of ancient or modern literature has a writer,
while living, been so generally recognized by his countrymen as their
national prophet as has the Italian poet and essayist Carducci. In
January, 1896, he completed his thirty-fifth year as Professor of
Belles-Lettres in the University of Bologna; and the solemn and
brilliant festivities with which the event was celebrated, extending
over three days and including congratulatory addresses from the king,
from the municipality, from the students and graduates, from foreign
universities, and from distinguished scholars at home and abroad,
testified to the remarkable hold this poet has gained on the
affections and esteem of the Italian people, and the deep impress
his writing has made on the literature of our time.

Born in northern Italy in the year 1836, and entering upon his
literary career at a time coincident with the downfall of foreign
power in Tuscany, the history of his authorship is a fair reflection
of the growth of the new Italy of to-day. In an autobiographical
sketch with which he prefaces his volume of 'Poesie' (1871) he depicts
with the utmost sincerity and frankness the transition through which
his own mind has passed, in breaking from the old traditions in which
he had been nursed at his mother's knee, and in meeting the dazzling
radiance of modern thought and feeling; the thrill of national liberty
and independence,--no longer a glory dreamed of, as by Alfieri, nor
sung in tones of despair, as by Leopardi, but as a living experience
of his own time. He felt the awakening to be at once a literary,
political, and religious one; and following his deep Hellenic
instincts, the religious rebound in him was rather to the paganism of
the ancient Latin forefathers than to the spiritual worship that had
come in with the infusion of foreign blood.

"This paganism," he says, "this cult of form, was naught else but the
love of that noble nature from which the solitary Semitic
estrangements had alienated hitherto the spirit of man in such bitter
opposition. My sentiment of opposition, at first feebly defined, thus
became confirmed conceit, reason, affirmation; the hymn to Apollo
became the hymn to Satan. Oh! the beautiful years from 1861 to 1865,
passed in peaceful solitude and quiet study, in the midst of a home
where the venerable mother, instea