by GIOSUE CARDUCCI - World eBook Library

Preface
greater than them all. Possibly he lacked the spontaneous
grace, the sudden fire, of the writer of " Fratelli d'ltalia,"
but, young as he still was, the poet shows behind his work.
When once Victor Emmanuel became master of Rome the
need of a singer by the way to sweeten the toil of war
ceased. In the years that followed Carducci rose to his
greatest height. He wrote of the deeds that had been,
and the remembered passion fired his thought. Dropping
the easy metre, the ringing refrain,
in which a nation in
battle finds fittest expression, he wove on classic lines, out
of the great chants of old Italian melodies which none
knew so well as he, metres full of force and of music,
and worthy of bearing the thought of a great poet.
Perhaps one of the greatest of his poems is " Piedmont,"
first printed on the 2Oth of September, 1890. It deals
with the short-lived triumph of the campaign of 1848, and
with what may be fitly termed the tragedy
of Charles
Albert. Of that Italian Hamlet, Carducci writes with
a sympathy surprising to those who know how stern his
judgments fall. Perhaps as he himself says,
it is because