Leaving the capital, says Arnaud, "he took up his abode on the hills
of Brescia, and for two weeks was seen wandering over the heights,
declaiming and gesticulating. The mountaineers thought him mad.
One morning he descended to the city with the manuscript of the
_Sepoleri_. It was in 1807. Not Jena, not Friedland, could dull the
sensation it imparted to the Italian republic of letters."
V
It is doubtful whether this poem, which Giudici calls the sublimest
lyrical composition modern literature has produced, will stir the
English reader to enthusiastic admiration. The poem is of its
age--declamatory, ambitious, eloquent; but the ideas do not seem great
or new, though that, perhaps, is because they have been so often
repeated since. De Sanctis declares it the "earliest lyrical note of
the new literature, the affirmation of the rehabilitated conscience
of the new manhood. A law of the Republic--"the French Republic"--
prescribed the equality of men before death. The splender of monuments
seemed a privilege of the nobles and the rich, and the Republicans
contested the privilege, the distinction of classes, even in this form
... This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries clouded
the poetry of life for him.... He lacked the religious idea, but the
sense of humanity in its progress and its aims, bound together by the
family, the state, liberty, glory--from this Foscolo drew his harmonies,
a new religion of the tomb.
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