THE ENGLISH POETS & ITALY.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1330, 6 January 1912, Page 9

THE ENGLISH POETS & ITALY.

Anthologies are always pleasant things to handle and dip into, particularly when they group themselves round somo special mood or aspect of poetry and let you see how that has been felt or seen by the great singers. It has teen a happy thought of Mr. G. M v Trevelyan, Italy's most distinguished historian, and, to borrow a title from an older generation, so to speak, Garibaldi's Englishman, to make ono out of tho lyrics that flowed from our English poets in celebration of the struggles and triumphs of Italy in her efforts to be free. . "English Songs of Italian Freedom" (just published by Messrs. Longmans) is a book that all readers of poetry—and especially those who share one of tho most huionrable and generous of their fathers' enthusiasms in politics—will be glad to have and read. In his introduction, Mr. Tievelyan traces the Italian "resurrection" out of the darkness.that was tho fniit cf the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in its first faint beginnings which stirred Ilyion and Shelley, in its despondency when from tho hand of Leopardi it drank the bitter and salutary cup of despair, iu its revival under Mazzini, and from' its splendid failure of '18 down to its triumph in the 'sixties, and ho shows you how out of.its doubts and struggles and triumphs a series of English poets made the most coherent and ascendant song of the embodied spirit of liberty that is to bo found in our literature. Not tho love of Greece, not even the enthusiasm.which flamed up to greet tho French Revolution, can compare with it in ■volume and persistence. From Byron's stirring "It is a grand object—the very poetry of politics. Only think—a froo Italy I ! !" to Browning's sham mocking, wholly serious, "Old Pictures in Florence" :—

•Shall I be alive that morning the scaffold Is broken away, and the long-pent fire, Like the golden hopo of the world, unbaltled Springs from its sleep, and up goes tho spire, While, "God and tho People" plain for its motto, Thence tho new tricolour flaps at the sky?

it grows in integrity aud passion, till in Meredith and Swinburne it is an unsurpassable splendour. As Mr. Trevelyan justly points out, "Vittoria" contains "not only incomparably the best poi-lraic of Mazzini, but mucn the closest contemporary study of the events of the ct mpaign for a United Italy. And, though in his ideas he bolonged to the older Mazzinian school of political thinking, and was republican and not royalist, what can coinpare in eloquence and fire \*ith Swinburne's "Songs- before Sunrise,'' in which all tho phasesiof tho revolution from '18 onwards are recorded and l.ymned? Wo have in our hands tho shining .And tho firo in our hearts of a star. Who are we tlmt our tongues should palter, Hearts bow down, hands lalter, ' Who are clothed as with flame fiom the altar, That the kings of the earth, repining, Far off, watch from afar? Mr. Trevelyan himself refers to Tripoli and the falling off from old ideals; n.ay wo add to what .Ue says the comment that Italy, reading the poems collected in his book, must believe when we criticise her it is in love and not in hostility, and that wo are not to blame if vc cannot help but judge her now by the c.tasuro of the honour that our poets have sung? —"Manchester Guardian."