thankfully for the
occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm
may still be unknown to Englishmen--"_piuttosto bruttini_." See what
an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but
tolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art
of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they
be condemned. _Brutto_--ugly--is the word of justice, the word for any
language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged
internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the
European concert. But _bruttino_ is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive
that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence,
and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the
rear--"rather than not." "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way
that we need say few words about--the fewer the better;" nay, this
paraphrase cannot achieve the homely Italian quality whereby the printed
and condemnatory criticism is made a family affair that shall go no
further. After the sound of it, the European concert seems to be
composed of brass instruments.

How unlike is the house of English language and the enclosure into which
a traveller hither has to enter! Do we possess anything here more
essentially ours (though we share it with our sister Germany) than our
particle "un"? Poor are those living languages that have not our use of
so rich a negative. The French equivalent in adjectives reaches no
further than the adjective itself--or hardly; it does not attain the
participle; so that no French or Italian poet has the words "unloved",
"unforgiven." None such, therefore, has the opportunity of the gravest
and the most majestic of all ironies. In our English, the words that are
denied are still there--"loved," "forgiven": excluded angels, who stand
erect, attesting what is not done, what is undone, what shall not be
done.

No merely opposite words could have so much denial, or so much pain of
loss, or so much outer darkness, or so much barred beatitude in sight.
All-present, all-significant, all-remembering, all-foretelling is the
word, and it has a plenitude of knowledge.

We have many more conspicuous possessions that are, like this, proper to
character and thought, and by no means only an accident of untransferable
speech. And it is impossible for a read