As the
fond crowd gives way to him, his young wife looks on him from her
window with an exultant love, unshadowed by any possibility of harm:
Mi meno a moglie e mi vuol tanto bene!
This is country and freedom to her,--this is strength which despots
cannot break,--this is joy to which defeat and ruin can never come
nigh! It might be any one of the sarcastic and quickwitted people
talking politics in the streets of Rome in 1847, who sees the
newly elected Senator--the head of the Roman municipality, and the
legitimate mediator between Pope and people--as he passes, and speaks
to him in these lines the dominant feeling of the moment:
THE CARDINALS.
O Senator of Rome! if true and well
You are reckoned honest, in the Vatican,
Let it be yours His Holiness to tell,
There are many Cardinals, and not one man.
They are made like lobsters, and, when they are dead,
Like lobsters change their colors and turn red;
And while they are living, with their backward gait
Displace and tangle good Saint Peter's net.
An impulse of the time is strong again in the following Stornello,--a
cry of reproach that seems to follow some recreant from a beleaguered
camp of true comrades, and to utter the feeling of men who marched to
battle through defection, and were strong chiefly in their just cause.
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