resembles the twitter of scarce-fledged birds, the chirrup of sparrows; then, with a miraculous volubility, this noisy note changes into a breathless song, more and more rapid in its trills, vibrating in sustained shakes, turning in daring flights of sound, leaping, growing, bounding, attaining the highest heights of the soprano. The songster is drunk with his own song. With pause so brief that one note scarce ceases ere another succeeds it, he spends his delirium in ever-varied melody, impassioned and sweet, subdued and ear-piercing, light and grave, now interrupted by broken sighs, by lament and supplication, now by impetuous lyrical improvisation and supreme appeal. It seems that even the gardens are listening, that the sky stoops over the old tree from whose summit this poet, invisible to mortal eyes, pours out such floods of eloquence. The flowers breathe deeply and silently. A yellow glow lingers in the west. This last lingering glance of the dying day is sad. But a single star has risen, alone and tremulous like a drop of luminous dew.'

He who can write thus is a great writer; and the charm of this passage is not alone its poetry but its exact truth. The song of the nightingale varies much in accord with age, with species (for there are two species, Luscinia Philomela, and Luscinia Major), with climate, with the sense of security, and the want of security, but the song of a nightingale in its maturity, who is unalarmed and feels at home in the gardens of his choice, is precisely such a song as is described in this passage, and is more completely echoed in it than in the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven. This sympathy with the melody of birds is the more singular in D'Annunzio, because Italians are almost invariably indifferent to such melody, and snare the divine songster in the net, or shoot him whilst he shouts his nuptial Io Triumphe! with the most stolid indifference. And it may, perhaps, be that D'Annunzio does not care for the bird himself more than the rest of his countrymen, but only cares for his own eloquence concerning it. It may be said, without risk of injustice to him, that great tenderness is at no moment found in him. He has not 'the pathetic fallacy'; but he approaches it very nearly at times. When women shall have lost for him some of the intensity of their physical charm, nature in her wider and more profound meanings will, perhaps, become more visible and more dear to him. Perhaps, however, it will not, for the Italian is rarely impersonal.

Something of the affectation to which the delicate taste of my Italian correspondent justly objects must be admitted to mar, by its artificiality, the many magnificent pages dedicated by him to the sea. Magnificent they are, true also, entirely true; but some mannerism there is in them, some over-intricate embroidery of phrase. The sea he knows best, and remembers always, is the Adriatic, of which the extreme beauty of the colour, like the leaves of the silverweed, as wind and sun pass over the meadows, has always before him been too little noted except, I may venture to say, by myself.

'O, fair, clear seas of September!' he cries in the Piacere. 'The water is calm and innocent as a sleeping child, and lies outstretched under a pearl-like sky. Sometimes it is all green of the brilliant and intense green of malachite, and on it the small rosy sails seem like wandering fires. Sometimes it is all azure, of an intense blue, like the ultramarine which heralds use for blazonries, veined with gold like lapis-lazuli, and on it the painted sails seem like a procession of standards, of banners, of spears borne on a Catholic holy day. And yet again at other moments it takes on a metallic gleam, a silvery paleness, the hues of a ripening lemon, something indefinable and strange, and on this mystical surface the boats then glide and fade, and are seen no more as the illumined wings of cherubim sink into the faint fundamental hues of an old Giottesque fresco.

'The sea was not alone for him a delight for the eyes, but it was a perennial wave in which he steeped his thirsting thoughts; a magical fountain of youth in which his body recovered health and his mind nobility. The sea had for him the mysterious attraction of a native country, and he abandoned himself to it with filial confidence, as a weak child in the arms of an omnipotent father; and he derived consolation from it, for no one had ever confided his sorrows, his desires, or his dreams to the ear of the sea in vain.'

So, we are told by D'Annunzio, thinks Andrea Sperelli, and so thought also Giorgio Aurispa. But the sea has no permanent power on the soul of either; the one returns from his contemplations of it to his life of voluptuous pleasure, and the other drowns both himself and the woman, whom he has adored to frenzy, in its waves, whilst the dog mourns 'forsaken beneath the olive trees, and the waters murmur softly, rocking as in a cradle the reflections of the stars.'

Only once in D'Annunzio's work does genuine and yearning regret, of which it is impossible to doubt the spontaneity and sincerity, thrill through him, and move him to intense emotion and unstudied eloquence. It is when, in the person of Claudio Cantelmo, he speaks in furious invective of the modern desecration of Rome; in these passages he is strong without effort, eloquent without study, and veracious alike in sorrow and in scorn. His invective is poured from his heart's depths, and thrills with the force of the Latin orators of the ruined Forum.

'I have lived several years in Rome; in that third Rome which should have represented "Love reigning by Latin blood on Latin soil," and have seen radiant on its heights the wondrous lights of a new Ideal. I have been witness to its most ignominious evolutions, to the most obscene unions that have ever desecrated a sacred place. And I have understood the symbolism hidden in that act of an Asiatic conqueror, who cast myriads of human heads in the fountains of Samarcand, when he desired to create a capital. The wise and cruel tyrant meant to signify the necessity of merciless destruction in the creation of a new order of things.

---

'The ship which bore the Thousand of Marsala only set sail that the art of exchange and barter should be protected and covered by the State!

---

'It was the epoch of the most frenzied fury of the destroyers and contractors on the site of Rome. With the storms of dust there were propagated a sort of lunacy of gain, a malignant delirium, seizing not only on the tradesman and money-lenders, and the workers in brick and mortar, but also on the elect heirs of the papal majorat, who primarily had looked with scorn and disgust on the newcomers from the windows of their palaces of travertine, indestructible under the encrustations of ages.

'The magnificent patrician races founded there, renewed and strengthened by nepotism, and the strife of opposing houses, descended and abased themselves one by one, slid down into the new mud, sank, and vanished. The illustrious riches, amassed through centuries of gorgeous pillage and Mæcenic luxury, were thrown into the whirlpool of the speculations of the Bourse.

'And around them, on these patrician lawns, where, only the previous spring, the violets had blossomed more numberless than the blades of grass, there were now mounds of lime, heaps of bricks, the wheels of stone-laden carts creaked on the turf, on the air were the oaths of the drivers, the shouts of the overseers, while every hour hastened on the brutal work which was to efface and occupy the sacred soil once dedicated to Beauty and to Dreams. There passed over Rome a blighting blizzard of barbarism,