Throughout these occurrences the voice of Giusti was heard whenever
that of good sense and a temperate zeal for liberty could be made
audible. He was an aristocrat by birth and at heart, and he looked
upon the democratic shows of the time with distrust, if not dislike,
though he never lost faith in the capacity of the Italians for an
independent national government. His broken health would not let him
join the Tuscan volunteers who marched to encounter the Austrians in
Lombardy; and though he was once elected member of the representative
body from Pescia, he did not shine in it, and refused to be chosen
a second time. His letters of this period afford the liveliest and
truest record of feeling in Tuscany during that memorable time of
alternating hopes and fears, generous impulses, and mean derelictions,
and they strike me as among the best letters in any language.
Giusti supported the Grand Duke's return philosophically, with a
sarcastic serenity of spirit, and something also of the indifference
of mortal sickness. His health was rapidly breaking, and in March,
1850, he died very suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs.
II
In noticing Giusti's poetry I have a difficulty already hinted, for if
I presented some of the pieces which gave him his greatest fame among
his contemporaries, I should be doing, as far as my present purpose is
concerned, a very unprofitable thing.
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