In Carducci rather than in any other Italian modern Italy seems to be summed up and expressed; he is the father as it were of the new generation, and his work in his art, like theirs in politics, is a struggle first for liberty and then for unity; his praise is that he achieved both and restored Poetry to Italy.

Born in 1836 in Valdicastello, near Pietrasanta, in the very garden of Tuscany, he came of an old family that had given a Gonfaloniere to Florence but was poor, his father being a doctor in the Pisan Maremma, that desert where for centuries nothing has broken the silence. There, in the midst of that marvellous and tragic country, the young Giosuè grew up, turning in the long evenings with his father his first pages of Virgil, of Horace, of Dante, of Tasso, the poets of his land: and wandering amid all that mysterious desolation he would shout the hexameters of Homer to the mountains and the sea dreaming of Ulysses, of Brutus, of the Gracchi, of Scipio Africanus who flung back Hannibal and saved Rome. Thus the classics early came to be for him no mere school books, but the very expression of life. His father, however, was not his only teacher, for it was his mother who taught him to love Alfieri when even a second-hand book seems to have been hard to come by and Chiarini tells us that when he got Ugo Foscolo's work he made her kneel and kiss it.

His father, an ardent Italian in the days when to be an Italian was to be anti-clerical, doubtless brought him up to hate the Church, and as a punishment made him learn Manzoni's "Morale Cattolica" by heart; but when he was thirteen the family went to Florence and Carducci was sent to the friars to the Scuole Pie. They certainly treated the classics less as

poetry than as school books, and after the freedom of his life in Maremma it is not surprising if his dislike of the priests was aggravated by the discipline of school. In 1853 he was sent to the Normal School of Pisa, of which he speaks so bitterly: "Here you will find a chattering professor who will merely tire you with his dates, copied from all sorts of books, then he will tell you with a grand air, without any explanation or reasoning, things which children of the second elementary school know, things hashed and rehashed by all the academicians in all academies of all time. Thus you will pass three years in studying Latin literature and lose your days in learning mere dates. As for Greek, you will have two professors who know Greek and pass their time in heated and angry arguments on the value of an aorist...." Later he went to the Ginnasio di S. Miniato al Tedesco in Val d'Arno. His father was doctor at Pian Castagnaio when the cholera epidemic broke out, and we find the young Carducci giving up his literary work, for already he was a poet, to nurse the sick. Then he went to Florence, really to earn his living by teaching and by writing, living in a tiny attic, and it was here that the news of his brother's death reached him, and no long time after of his father's, which left him with his mother, his young brother, his cousin and future wife entirely dependent on him, for there were but two lire left in the house after the funeral. "How we lived I can't now tell," he writes later, "but the impression remains that one can exist on next to nothing." It was in 1857 that he published his first book of verses "Rime," and out of it, though it can have brought him but little money and less outside fame, sprang the society Gli Amici Pedanti. Carducci at this

time certainly hated Romanticism; it was as much a political hatred as a literary, for Romanticism as he understood it was foreign, "an irreverence" as he said, "to our classical writers": only the wise Nencioni seems to have dissented. It was the work of the Renaissance that he sought to continue, and to make this clearer the journal of Gli Pedanti was called "Il Poliziano." Meanwhile in 1859, though he could not volunteer to serve either with Garibaldi or in the army-and this he speaks of as the second of his great trials in life-he addressed Vittorio Emmanuele in a magnificent ode, for at that time he seems to have looked to him as the saviour of Italy, while he heard the battle cries of Milan, of Brescia, of Venice, and the rattle of the Austrian rifles in Piazza della Signoria.

Italy was really free and united at last, when in 1861, just after the death of Cavour, Mamiani appointed Carducci to the chair of Literature in the University of Bologna. His advent there was a sort of challenge: his lectures were crowded, he was known for his vigorous eloquence, his satire and his rationalism. Just before this began to appear those editions and texts of the classics that are even to-day the best we have, the poetry of Lorenzo Magnifico, of Alfieri, Giusti and the rest, edited with the rarest scholarship and learning, founding a tradition that was under his direction to bear such splendid fruit later in the work of Casini, Straccali and others.

He hated, as we know, all priests, and at last, in 1865, he published at Pistoja, under the name of Enotrio Romano, the famous "Inno a Satana," written in 1863, in which, like our own Milton, but without his splendor or self-deception, he took the supreme rebel for his hero. That poem has been more than overpraised; it has been used to support every stupidity of

which the Liberal cause is capable. It is his punishment that of all his verses it is the best known, while the beautiful lines "Presso l' urna di Shelley" and "Alle fonti del Clitumno" are for the most part ignored; and indeed the least pleasing spectacle in his life is concerned with this hymn. He had married in 1866, and in 1870 his mother died, only just before his adored child at the age of three years. "He was beautiful," says Carducci simply, "and a real miracle for his age, he used to recite 'Salute O Satana o ribellione' in his clear voice, striking the table with his little hand and stamping the floor." It is difficult to forgive Carducci for that.

It is in 1877 that the first "Odi Barbari"-Barbari because they would have been so to Greeks and Romanswere published. With this new rhythm, rhyme became useless and Carducci gladly rejected it not without bidding it goodbye. Here at last he has returned to his first love, that pagan sentiment and antique form which with him was altogether sincere and natural. He was content that the form which he loved should limit, as form always and rightly must do, his imagination while lending him in an ode like that to Eugenio Napoleone, as has been well said, something of the largeness of Sophocles. But in the second "Odi Barbari" something personal has already come into his work and in the third he knows that "the poetry of our time is no longer an element of national life nor a need of society . . . it is an individual expression." Thus his work was completed; he had expressed himself at last. We are not concerned with his political career, nor to tell the manifold stories of his integrity, vigor and splendid common-sense. For him Queen Margherita imitated Cosimo di Medici, buying Carducci's library as Cosimo bought Niccoli's. He is dead, his verse remains and will remain the

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glory of his awakened and immortal country. In thinking of this man, inevitably involved in hatred as well as love, it is with gladness one remembers those last verses, written just ten years ago:

The Saturday Review.

Ave Maria! Quando su l'aure corre l'umil saluto, i piccioli mortali scovrono il capo curvano la fronte Dante ed Aroldo,

and, who knows, Carducci too, the third among the poets of Italy.

The difference between summer and winter in this country is more marked in the woods than anywhere else. This at least is the case if the observation be understood to refer especially to bird life; and many of us in our walks take more note of the birds than of any other single factor that goes to make up the impression of Nature at a particular season. The general aspect of the face of the country gives the keynote, and the birds supply a living commentary.

Apart from the birds, the woods are certainly no more changed than the open country. The tilled land and the pastures and hedges become, if any. thing, more dead than the woods through the fall of the leaves, the collapse of the grass, and the getting in of the crops. In the woods, too, the tree trunks are the same in winter as in summer, a substantial element of continuity that largely counteracts the violence of the change in the carpeting and underbush; for violent indeed we should find it if only our memories were a little longer and more vivid. The leaves are gone from the trees; but the beautiful interlacing of the bare twigs against the evening sky is enough to reconcile one to a few months' loss of the leaves. The feature of the winter woods that contributes most to their air of deadness is undoubtedly the reduction in bird life. One recent January afternoon we were standing against the trunk of a tree in a quiet stretch of woodland. (If you wish to

find out what life is astir in a wood. it is always a good plan to lean against a tree and keep still for a while.) The chief element of color, sound, and motion was given by a few chaffinches, with their ringing call of "fink-fink," and the bright feathers they showed in flitting here and there among the bare bushes. When the chaffinches were quiet or out of sight for a time. the hush that rested on the wood was remarkable. We thought of the same place as it was in the summer- as it would be again in five months' time. In a straggling bramble bush beside the keeper's track there had been a whitethroat's nest; as we passed the bird used to look out through a little gap in the leaves, hesitating whether to sit close or fly. At that time the bramble was full of leaves, and matted thickly with grass blades and dog'smercury springing from the ground below. On all hands there was the greenness and richness that come of freshly moving sap; and the whole wood was stirring with the life which the summer birds bring back with them in April- chiff-chaffs, wood-wrens, blackbirds and thrushes singing by the dozen from the high trees, and from the underbrush dozens again of willow-wrens, blackcaps, garden-warblers, and many other minor but still persistent and pleasing singers. The more clearly one can recall the wonderful chorus of these woods in early summer, the more dead does the present stillness seem.

We must not exaggerate the stillness.

however. Presently it is agreeably broken by a party of tits. Of all the birds you may find in the woods in winter, the various kinds of tits do the most to relieve the quiet. They go about in busy, straggling companies, calling cheerfully to one another, probing and scrutinizing crevices in bark, hanging under the twigs to pick minute insects from the buds; but when they have passed on, leaving a seemingly greater stillness than before. Another bird that is never long in showing himself is the robin. One came up to inspect us directly after we had taken our stand by the tree. He has since been taking stock of us from all points, at a radius of a few yards, and now he has lighted on a twig only a foot or two from our faces. The twig is still springing gently up and down under him; but he keeps his head in one place, in a manner peculiar to robins, so that his full black eye is a fixed point. But the robin does nothing to disturb the winter hush in the woods. On the contrary he is the feathered embodiment of it. All his ways at this time of the year suggest that he is fully conscious of it, and unwilling to break it unnecessarily. When he has to change his position, as when he flits to a fresh perch or alters the cock of his head, he does it with a soft suddenness, and then holds himself rigidly still.

A flock of wood pigeons wheel hastily round above the tops of the trees, and the cause of their uneasiness is apparent when a sparrow-hawk crosses higher up. The most startling shock upon the quietness, however, comes a minute later. A couple of jays, going stealthily about their unhallowed business, have marked us from a good distance through the trees, and now set up their well-known scolding cry, the harshest and most violent voice of the whole woodland. As we at length move from our post the outery is reThe Speaker.

doubled, but is soon lost. Jays seem to know there is a price on their heads, and they seldom take needless risks. On the edge of the wood we hear a nuthatch, and a green woodpecker flies back out of some hedge-row oaks.

It is not often that you will visit a wood, even in the depth of winter, without finding something of interest among the birds. But the impression of dead stillness is always uppermost. There is nothing at all like it in the ordinary open country. The bird life of the fields in winter is very different from that of the summer, but it is often almost as animated. The kinds of birds are fewer, and instead of the diffusion characteristic of the summer a diffusion that has its basis in the nests concealed all about in the green hedges and the long grass - we see now a very general concentration into flocks. There are flocks of peewits, both on the pastures and fallows; fieldfares and redwings in flocks hunt for slugs among the roots of the grass, or settle on the hedges to strip them of the remaining hips and haws; finches, yellow-hammers, titlarks, and other small birds go about all the winter in larger or smaller parties. All these, with the homely rooks and starlings, combine to keep up the sense of life through the winter in the open fields.

In moist tropical countries the changes of the seasons are at a minimum. They are at a maximum as regards bird life in the North Siberian tundras and other arctic breeding grounds, where, with early summer and the arrival of the birds, a dead land becomes suddenly a land teeming with life. In this country, as represented by the fields and gardens, we have a middle state between these extremes; but in our woodlands the seasons bring a change that is more nearly comparable with that which accompanies them within the arctic circle.

The more one sees of the grayness and blankness of the lives of the English poor, the more one is led to lament the absence of the element of color and brightness supplied by religion. It is one of the normal functions of religion to provide an immense background to life, to create an atmosphere, to bring something large and imaginative into the most contracted lives. Normally this is done for the mass of the people by their religion. In Holy Week, among a Catholic population, the events and persons of today are less real and living than that tremendous drama of two thousand years ago, which is touching the imagination and sympathy of multitudes. The whole population is in an immense theatre, sorrowing with Mary and detesting Judas.

What indeed is a religion without Feasts? A Feast is not a Bank Holiday, but the commemoration of some great event or deliverance, coming down through long ages, kept by generation after generation. This is so, not only in Christian lands, in Brittany and Ireland, in Spain and Russia, but among Jews and Hindoos and Muhamadans. How the Passover must have kept the Jews together! What Easter was to the medieval Christian, Purim again is to the orthodox Jew. In many countries at this feast the Jews make and send to one another cakes called "Haman's ears." Haman is the execrated villain of the drama, as Judas is in Holy Week. It is good for people to be lifted above their merely personal experiences and the trivialities of every day, and united in an unselfish detestation of Judas or Haman or even Guy Fawkes.

Such memories appeal but little to the mass of the English people, whose religion is as colorless as Dr. Clifford

himself could desire. This is their misfortune rather than their fault, and is no excuse for depriving them of the last remnants of what they so greatly need. The ornaments on cottage walls tell their own tale. There is no Crucifix; no Palm Sunday spray of box or willow bears its green witness to good thoughts and wider things. A bènitier is a not infrequent adornment, but it is generally used as a pipestand. This agrees with what the present writer was told by an old soldier, describing his experiences in India. "We're bringin' 'em into Christianity very fast in the Madras territory," he said, "they smokes their pipes the same as we do now." Sometimes one sees cheap colored prints of the Madonna. and the scenes of the Passion, bought from some wandering Italian or Savoyard, but they are evidently there merely as odds and ends, not as part of a system by which the people live. Old people are heard to say that "the Saviour's Letter," a framed and printed copy of the Epistle to Abgarus, King of Edessa, was once common in country cottages, but we have never had the good fortune to come across it. Ꭺ small model of the instruments of the Passion under a glass case-the cross, the spear, the nails, the hammer, the sponge, the ladder, even the cock-is occasionally seen. In remote districts of Yorkshire the people called it "Jacob's Ladder."

In Yorkshire and Lancashire indeed many customs remain which have long died out in other parts of England. One hears sometimes a rhyme giving the old popular names of the last Sundays in Lent:

Tid-Mid and Misere,

Carling, Palm, and Paste-egg Day.

"Tid-Mid" is Mid-Lent Sunday, the