ic element in human life, external to the
personality of the poet, which exercised so strong a fascination over
our ballad-bards and playwrights, has but little attraction for the
Italian. When he sings, he seeks to express his own individual
emotions--his love, his joy, his jealousy, his anger, his despair. The
language which he uses is at the same time direct in its intensity,
and hyperbolical in its display of fancy; but it lacks those
imaginative touches which exalt the poetry of personal passion into a
sublimer region. Again, the Italians are deficient in a sense of the
supernatural. The wraiths that cannot rest because their love is still
unsatisfied, the voices which cry by night over field and fell, the
water-spirits and forest fairies, the second-sight of coming woes, the
presentiment of death, the warnings and the charms and spells, which
fill the popular poetry of all Northern nations, are absent in Italian
songs. In the whole of Tigri's collection I only remember one mention
of a ghost. It is not that the Italians are deficient in superstitions
of all kinds. Every one has heard of their belief in the evil eye, for
instance. But they do not connect this kind of fetichism with their
poetry; and even their greatest poets, with the exception of Dante,
have shown no capacity or no inclination for enhancing the imaginative
effect of their creations by an appeal to the instinct of mysterious
awe.

The truth is that the Italians as a race are distinguished as much by
a firm grasp upon the practical realities of existence as by powerful
emotions. They have but little of that dreamy _Schwaermerei_ with which
the people of the North are largely gifted. The true sphere of their
genius is painting. What appeals to the imagination through the eyes,
they have expressed far better than any other modern nation. But
their poetry, like their music, is deficient in tragic sublimity and
in the higher qualities of imaginative creation.

It may seem paradoxical to say this of the nation which produced
Dante. But we must remember not to judge races by single and
exceptional men of genius. Petrarch, the Troubadour of exquisite
emotions, Boccaccio, who touches all the keys of life so lightly,
Ariosto, with the smile of everlasting April on his lips, and Tasso,
excellent alone when he confines himself to pathos or the picturesque,
are no exceptions to what I have just said. Yet these poets pursued
their art with conscious purpose. T