Modern Italian Poets eBook

of Italy to the unity of the language, from the usurpations and tyranny of Austria to the assumptions of Della Crusca.  But Monti could scarcely help any cause which he espoused; and it seems to me that he was as well employed in disputing the claims of the Tuscan dialect to be considered the Italian language as he would have been in any other way.  The wonderful facility, no less than the unreality, of the man appears in many things, but in none more remarkably than his translation of Homer, which is the translation universally accepted and approved in Italy.  He knew little more than the Greek alphabet, and produced his translation from the preceding versions in Latin and Italian, submitting the work to the correction of eminent scholars before he printed it.  His poems fill many volumes; and all display the ease, perspicuity, and obvious beauty of the improvvisatore.  From a fathomless memory, he drew felicities which had clung to it in his vast reading, and gave them a new excellence by the art with which he presented them as new.  The commonplace Italians long continued to speak awfully of Monti as a great poet, because the commonplace mind regards everything established as great.  He is a classic of those classics common to all languages—­dead corpses which retain their forms perfectly in the coffin, but crumble to dust as soon as exposed to the air.

III

From the Bassvilliana I have translated the passage descriptive of Louis XVI.’s ascent to heaven; and I offer this, perhaps not quite justly, in illustration of what I have been saying of Monti as a poet.  There is something of his curious verbal beauty in it, and his singular good luck of phrase, with his fortunate reminiscences of other poets; the collocation of the different parts is very comical, and the application of it all to Louis XVI. is one of the most preposterous things in literature.  But one must remember that the poor king was merely a subject, a theme, with the poet.

    As when the sun uprears himself among
    The lesser dazzling substances, and drives
    His eager steeds along the fervid curve,—­

    When in one only hue is painted all
    The heavenly vault, and every other star
    Is touched with pallor and doth veil its front,

    So with sidereal splendor all aflame
    Amid a thousand glad souls following,
    High into heaven arose that beauteous soul.

    Smiled, as he passed them, the majestical,
    Tremulous daughters of the light, and shook
    Their glowing and dewy tresses as they moved,

    He among all with longing and with love
    Beaming, ascended until he was come
    Before the triune uncreated life;

    There his flight ceases, there the heart, become
    Aim of the threefold gaze divine, is stilled,
    And all the urgence of desire is lost;

    There on his temples he receives the crown
    Of living amaranth immortal, on
    His cheek the kiss of everlasting peace.