How necessary was an original and soaring spirit to infuse life into the poetry of Italy! At last the poet arose whose gifts were exactly adapted to the arduous task. That Leopardi fulfilled his mission with brilliant success, is proved by the ever increasing influence of his genius. During his life-time he was known only to the master-spirits of his age, but since his death, his works have become the property of the nation at large. His greatness is acknowledged daily more and more, and volumes are written on his life and writings, illustrating and examining them from every point of view, and the more his poems are studied, the more are their beauties revealed.
As Carlyle said of Dante: "He is great, not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep." This depth, so unfathomable, and yet so remote from obscurity, is the first and greatest of his intellectual qualities. Closely allied to it is his amazing originality of thought and style. He deserted the hackneyed vehicles of expression current in his day, the minute Sonnet and the elaborate Petrarchan Canzone. His thoughts, for the most part, flow in an easy and pellucid style through an alternation of rhymed and unrhymed verses. He knew, what so few poets of modern times even suspect, the value of economy. What he can say in one line, he does not dilute into five, If one simile suffices for his purpose, he does not regale the reader with ten. Bombast and grandiloquence he shunned, nay, he rather courted the other extreme of severe simplicity. Though a man of vast learning, he seldom indulged in allusions. In reading his poems we are brought into direct contact with Nature, and with her alone, so perfectly does he divest himself of every thought foreign to his present subject. His verses seem the inspiration of the moment, and not the result of elaborate study. We see him in the "Ricordanze," surveying the objects that revive the memories of the past; we see him in the little poem to the Moon, ascending the hill to behold the familiar radiance; we see him in the "Ginestra," gazing on the sparkling heavens and the fiery crater of Vesuvius, until we quite lose the sense of perusing a written performance.
And yet we know that he bestowed elaborate care on his works. He says himself that he had an ideal of unattainable perfection in his mind, which deterred him from writing works of great extent, whether in prose or verse. But that ideal I think he really has attained in some of his finest poems. The merit of his works, not only in degree, but in kind, is so immeasurably superior to that of his contemporaries, that we cannot find a standard for judging it without going back to the greatest masters of the art of poetry. I have no hesitation in placing him immediately after Dante and Ariosto for strength of poetical genius. He surpasses Petrarch in variety and comprehensiveness of mind, although he may not always equal him in richness of style. For genuine poetical inspiration in the purely lyrical sphere he has no rivals in modern times except Shelley, Keats, and Goethe. To prove that this eulogy is not exaggerated, we will now examine the "Canti" in the order of their arrangement.
