A heavy
bribe secured the remains of Leopardi from this fate, and his dust now
reposes in a little church on the road to Pozzuoli.
II
"In the years of boyhood," says the Neapolitan critic, Francesco de
Sanctis, "Leopardi saw his youth vanish forever; he lived obscure, and
achieved posthumous envy and renown; he was rich and noble, and he
suffered from want and despite; no woman's love ever smiled upon him,
the solitary lover of his own mind, to which he gave the names of
Sylvia, Aspasia, and Nerina. Therefore, with a precocious and bitter
penetration, he held what we call happiness for illusions and deceits
of fancy; the objects of our desire he called idols, our labors
idleness, and everything vanity. Thus he saw nothing here below equal
to his own intellect, or that was worthy the throb of his heart; and
inertia, rust, as it were, even more than pain consumed his life,
alone in what he called this formidable desert of the world. In such
solitude life becomes a dialogue of man with his own soul, and the
internal colloquies render more bitter and intense the affections
which have returned to the heart for want of nourishment in the world.
Mournful colloquies and yet pleasing, where man is the suicidal
vulture perpetually preying upon himself, and caressing the wound that
drags him to the grave.
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