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nours and the mourning of friends, do not contribute to render the sleep of the dead more peaceful and soft. "No," says he, "but are tombs raised merely for the benefit of the dead? Do not the living draw from them a source of comfort and instruction? Do not the tears which the widow and the orphan shed upon the tomb of their departed husband or father, do they not relieve them? Are not tears the greatest comfort in irretrievable evils? And yet this comfort has appeared useless to the legislators of my country; the gate of the enclosure, where our dead are buried, stands immovable, and deaf to the wailings of the living."

Here Pindemonte avails himself of the opportunity of combating the frigid tenets of the material school; which although they have crept through some wayward intellects in all times, yet have been proclaimed in our days in a bolder manner, in consequence of the general confusion of ideas produced by so many overwhelming catastrophes. Thus, in an earthquake, strange animals come creeping out of their dens and lurking holes, while the earth heaves, walls are crushed, and the very foundations of massive monuments become exposed to the light of day. Even the corrected and improved version of these tenets tends to reduce man to the state of a useful machine, making him a mere instrument as perfect as possible, but still an instrument, unbiassed by feeling and enthusiasm, and employed all his life solely in gathering as much as he can for the great bee-hive of the community. This is the beau ideal of the system; but it will not do. Something must be left to man's independence; the very aberrations of his mind, his very passions, the flights of his fancy, the instinctive throbbings of his heart, constitute his freedom, which some modern sages would destroy.

Di seste armata, e tutta angoli e cifre,

E massi e spazj, l' età nostra ride

Dell' altrice di sogni antica etade

Thus remarks Torti, in his poetical commentary on the two poems of Foscolo and Pindemonte. On this subject the latter observes, alluding to Prometheus' traditional attempt and failure:

Il divin figlio, se talor col falso

Che Grecia immaginò, dir lice il vero,

Il divin figlio di Giapeto volle

L'uman seme formar, d'inganni dolci,

* A similar image, employed in a different sense, is found in Propertius' beautiful elegy on the death of Cornelia :

Desine Paule meum lacrymis urgere sepulcrum,

Panditur ad nullas janua nigra preces :

Cum semel infernas intrarunt funera leges

Non exorato stant adamante viæ.

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VOL. III. PART II.

2 E

D'illusioni amabili, di sogni

Dorati amico e di dorate larve.

Questa, io sento gridar, fù la sua colpa ;
Ciò punisce l'augel che il cor gli rode
Sù la rupe Caucasea, e non le tolte
Dalla lampa del ciel sacre faville,
Quindi l' uomo a rifar Prometei nuovi

Si volgono, e dell' uom, non che il pensiero,
L'interno senso ad emendar si danno.

When will it be allowed on all sides that the mind of man requires certain indulgences; that it feeds upon recollections and hopes; that life, matter-of-fact life, circumscribed by calculations of mere utility, without affection or enthusiasm, without visions of past, and dreams of future bliss, without poetry, in short, would appear to many as not worth having? Logicians may reason, rhetoricians may declaim against this or that custom, against this or that prejudice, they will never succeed in eradicating all prejudices from the minds of men. But let us prune, let us graft them so as to render them harmless, and even beneficial. Of these prejudices, if they must be so called, those connected with the disposal of dead bodies, and the management of funeral rites and memorials, are among the most strongly impressed on the human mind in all countries, and at all times. Pindemonte displays before his readers the various forms in which this feeling of the human heart manifests itself; in the rude people who refuse to leave their dwellings if they cannot carry along with them the bones of their fathers; in the savage mother who sits over the grave of her infant child, and with tears presses over it the now superfluous nourishment from her breast. Achilles comforted his grief with the idea of having his ashes enclosed in the same urn with Patroclus. Rome, Greece, and ancient Egypt, loved and reverenced their sepulchral monuments. The nations of the east, to this day, devote large tracts of ground shaded by cool groves, to be the last mansion of their dead. He then more particularly alludes to the curious vaults he beheld in Sicily, and which we have also seen in other parts of the Mediterranean, where the bodies of the dead are preserved, and the skin and muscles of the face and hands dried up by a particular process, so as to retain their features for many long years; the corpses are dressed up in the garments they used to wear in life, and then sitting or standing, are placed in niches, to the view of the visitants, on the anniversary of All Souls.

Discende allor ne' sotterranei chiostri
Lo stuol devoto: pendono dall' alto
Lampadi con più faci; al corpo amato
Ciascun si volge, e sù gli aspetti smunti

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This striking description of a singular custom affords a strong image of that luxury of grief to which southern people are prone, both by temperament, and by the tenets of their faith.

But a sight of this nature, our poet justly observes, might appal or disgust a delicate mind; he therefore changes the scene, and leads his readers to other climes, where, under verdant groves, and on the bank of a bubbling brook, rises a snow-white monument, the symbol of conjugal love, and whose marble lustre contrasts with the fresh green and flowery carpet round its base. The hereditary mansion, in which the departed heaved her last sigh, appears in sight: there no ascetic gloom, no superstitious horror is inspired, every thing breathes soft, and melancholy, and tender remembrances. Moderate your grief, O, my beloved, for I am blessed," thus the marble is made to say. The scene of these consolatory images is England, a country early visited by Pindemonte, and of which he speaks in several of his writings with fond recollection. He expatiates on the beauties of the English country residences and parks, and wishes himself again in those hospitable shades, " E udir da lunge appena-mugghiar del Mondo la tempesta."

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But the monuments of the departed afford not merely comfort to the living; they are also monitors, from which the citizen is taught to make a better use of his remaining time, and the youth feels inspired to magnanimous deeds. "Dost thou not wish, O, my Verona, to behold thy future sons illustrious in the sciences, or in the arts? If thou dost not, go, and those images, which in better times thou didst erect in thy forum, hurl them to the ground; let thy divine Fracastoro fall from on high, and Maffei's bust, broke in a hundred fragments, lie scattered over the ungrateful soil."

After praising Foscolo's generous and sacred flame in defence of the last abodes of men, and comparing his poetry to the blue

Rhone, which comes out rapid and transparent from the Leman, and then disappears at once under the earth, to rush out to light again some distance thence, the poet digresses into an affecting lamentation on the death of the amiable Eliza, (Countess Mosconi, to whom he had addressed one of his epistles in the year 1800,) of whom he speaks in strains of the most delicate but heartfelt tenderness. "Behold her tomb, for my countrymen now allow a separate abode to the dead; this is the slab inscribed to the best of mothers." The lofty mysteries of religion, the thoughts of final resurrection, afford our author a consolatory and appropriate termination to his poem. He speaks of the last day when Eliza's rest will be interrupted by the archangel's sound. What will Eliza's remains then be? Perhaps an herb, a plant, or flower, moist with the dews of morn; but the elements of which Eliza was formed will return unto Eliza. But how?

Chi seppe tesser pria dell' uom la tela,
Ritesserla saprà: l'eterno Mastro
Fece assai più, quando le rozze fila
Del suo nobil lavor dal nulla trasse ;
E allor non fia per circolar di tanti
Secoli e tanti indebolita punto,

Ne invecchiâta la man del Mastro eterno.
Lode à lui, lode à lui sino à quel giorno.

We will now proceed to consider Pindemonte in both the capacities of a dramatist and of a critic. His tragedy of Arminio, and the three discorsi or treatises, he wrote simultaneously, and which being published together in one volume, brought him before the public under this double character.

The drama of Arminius, which our author wrote in 1797, is a regular tragedy, although not perhaps strictly classical. The subject is taken from a few words of Tacitus, who, speaking of the German hero, reports that he attempted to reign over his country, and perished in the attempt through the treachery of his relatives. Upon this passage Pindemonte has built his plot. We shall not enter into any details upon the texture of the play; our object being rather to examine its general character and spirit. Suffice it, that Arminius is opposed in his attempt by the bold patriotism of Telgastes, another chief; that his son, Baldero, rather than see the enslavement of his country, and prevented by filial duty from raising his arm against his parent, destroys himself; that the warriors are divided between Arminius and his opposer, and a combat ensues, in which Arminius, after fighting valiantly, forsaken by his own men, betrayed by his uncle, and, covered with wounds, expires, confessing the justice of his fate, approving of his rival's conduct, and sanctioning Telgastes' once-proposed

marriage with his daughter. There is in this play the same sort of political interest which is found in those of Alfieri, although the sentiments are less truculent. The conduct of Baldero, opposed to that of Brutus, as represented by Alfieri and other tragedians, is a deviation perhaps not unfavourable from the unnatural patriotism of the supposed (though gratuitously so) son of Julius. The dialogue between Baldero and his father is perhaps the most interesting part of the drama; the conflict of national and filial sentiments in an ingenuous and amiable youth; his entreaties to his beloved father to desist from his attempt; the fond pleas he uses to persuade him; his father's tenderness towards his son, opposed by his inflexibility in the pursuit of his ambitious views; all these throw a deep pathos and an air of truth over the whole scene, so much so, that, when Baldero kills himself, the action seems suspended, and the author himself informs us, in the subjoined discourse, that having read his manuscript to several friends, one of them drawing him aside, and in a state of visible trepidation, as if communicating a piece of disastrous information, whispered to him, that, by the death of Baldero, the tragedy ended with the third act, "as if," adds Pindemonte, "the death of Baldero were the action of the drama." But the pedantry of his friend had, however, we suspect, a secret affinity to true feeling; because the author, as he himself seems aware, has spread over the son much more interest than over the character of Telgastes, who, however, ought to divide with Arminius the attention to the end of the play. The character of Arminius, although well drawn, has little novelty in it. There are some fine passages relating to the enslaved condition of Rome as described by Telgastes, who had just returned from a fruitless mission to the imperial city, and had seen the hollow, cruel, impenetrable Tiberius, upon whose enigmatic words, or atrocious silence and ambiguous countenance, depended the existence of millions-Tiberius, who feared freedom of speech, and at the same time hated the flatteries of his servile senators. Telgastes, after long procrastination, being admitted to his presence, proposed frankly that the Rhine should be the boundary between the two nations, thus putting an end to all future dissensions:

Con viso immoto

Tiberio udi: poi tanto avviluppata
Risposta die; così la guerra insieme
E la pace aggruppò, che agevol cosa
L'intenderlo non fù. Ma pur compres
Ch' era inutil del Reno il far parole:
Che abbandonar quelle Germane genti
Non si potea che patti fer con Roma;

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