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.