They told his father he would make a good farmer, but a scholar,
never. They nicknamed him the _mole_, for his dullness; but, in the
mean time, he was making underground progress of his own, and he came
to the surface one day, a mole no longer, to everybody's amazement,
but a thing of such flight and song as they had never seen before,--in
fine, a poet. He was rather a scapegrace, after he ceased to be a
mole, at school; but when he went to the University at Padua, he
became conspicuous among the idle, dissolute students of that day for
temperate life and severe study. There he studied law, and learned
patriotism; political poetry and interviews with the police were the
consequence, but no serious trouble.
One of the offensive poems, which he says he and his friends had the
audacity to call an ode, was this:
Sing we our country. 'T is a desolate
And frozen cemetery;
Over its portals undulates
A banner black and yellow;
And within it throng the myriad
Phantoms of slaves and kings:
A man on a worn-out, tottering
Throne watches o'er the tombs:
The pallid lord of consciences,
The despot of ideas.
Tricoronate he vaunts himself
And without crown is he.
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