Mazzini in 1831 was twenty-six years of age.  His father was a Genoese physician, his mother a native of Chiavari.  She was a superior woman, and devoted more than a mother’s care to the excitable and delicate child, who seemed to her (mothers have sometimes the gift of prophecy) to be meant for an uncommon lot.  One of the few personal reminiscences that Mazzini left recorded, relates to the time and manner in which the idea first came to him of the possibility of Italians doing something for their country.  He was walking with his mother in the Strada Nuova at Genoa one Sunday in April 1821, when a tall, black-bearded man with a fiery glance held towards them a white handkerchief, saying:  ‘For the refugees of Italy.’  Mazzini’s mother, gave him some money, and he passed on.  In the streets were many unfamiliar faces; the fugitives from Turin and Alessandria were gathered at Genoa before they departed by sea into exile.  The impression which that scene made on the mind of the boy of sixteen was never effaced.

Owing to his delicate health, Mazzini’s early education was carried on at home, where the social atmosphere was that of one of those little centres in a provincial capital which are composed of a few people, mostly kindred, of similar tastes, who lead useful and refined lives, content with moderate ease.  The real exclusiveness of such centres exceeds any that exists in the most aristocratic sphere in the world.  The Mazzinis were, moreover, Genoese to the core; and this was another reason for exclusiveness, and for holding aloof from the governing class.  Mazzini was born a few days after Napoleon entered Genoa as its lord.  He had not, therefore, breathed the air of the ancient Republic; but there was the unadulterated republicanism of a thousand years in his veins.

When he grew to manhood his appearance was striking.  The black, flowing hair, the pale, olive complexion, the finely-cut features and lofty brow, the deep-set eyes, which could smile as only Italian eyes can smile, but which could also flash astral infinitudes of scorn, the fragile figure, even the long, delicate, tapering fingers, marked him for a man apart—­though whether a poet or an apostle, a seer or a saint, it was not easy to decide.  Yet this could be said at once:  if this man concentrated all his being on a single point, he would wield the power, call it what we will, which in every age has worked miracles and moved mountains.

Mazzini became a Carbonaro, though the want of clear, guiding principles in Carbonarism made him misdoubt its efficacy, and its hierarchical mysteries and initiatory ordeals repelled him by their childishness.  Then followed his arrest, and his detention in the fortress of Savona, which was the turning-point in his mental life.  Before that date he learnt, after it he taught.  From his high-perched cell he saw the sea and the sky—­with the Alps, the sublimest things in Nature.  The voices of the fishermen reached his ears, though he could not see them.  A tame goldfinch was his companion.  Here, in a solitude and peace which he remembered with regret in the stormy and sorrowful years that were to come, he conceived his message and the mission, in which he believed to the last day of his life.