O'er these monuments in vigil
Cloudless the sun flames and glows
In the wind for funeral torches,--
And the violet, and the rose,
And the grape, the fig, the olive,
Are the emblems fit of grieving;
'T is, in fact, a cemetery
To strike envy in the living.
Well, in fine, O brother corpses,
Let them pipe on as they like;
Let us see on whom hereafter
Such a death as ours shall strike!
'Mongst the anthems of the function
Is not _Dies Irae_? Nay,
In all the days to come yet,
Shall there be no Judgment Day?
In a vein of like irony, the greater part of Giusti's political poems
are written, and none of them is wanting in point and bitterness, even
to a foreigner who must necessarily lose something of their point
and the _tang_ of their local expressions. It was the habi
the satirist, who at least loved the people's quaintness and
originality--and perhaps this is as much democracy as we ought to
demand of a poet--it was Giusti's habit to replenish his vocabulary
from the fountains of the popular speech. By this means he gave his
satires a racy local flavor; and though he cannot be said to have
written dialect, since Tuscan is the Italian language, he gained by
these words and phrases the frankness and fineness of dialect.
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