but in every other respect her Gretchen was incomparably superior. Tamberlik was perhaps never heard to less advantage than in Faust, the music lying unfortunately for his voice, and being ill adapted to his fervid style. Those who admire Giuglini would of course admire his Faust; to me he is the most uninteresting of tenors. Graziani's noble voice is unhappily accompanied with an amount of histrionic intelligence on a level with that of Giuglini; and he was consequently far below Santley in the part of Valentine. The Mephistopheles of Faure was as admirable as that of Gassier was mistaken. Faure knew very well that the Tempter was not to be played as a fat, impudent, good-natured pimp. Costa's band-when it did not drown the voices-was everything that could be wished; Arditi's band was not by any means what could be wished, even when it did not drown the voices. Such was the season of 1863. One cannot conscientiously call it a brilliant season, nor can one, without large hopefulness, see in it the prospect of a return of that splendid epoch when Grisi, Rubini, Tamburini, and Lablache held us under a spell; nor indeed of that epoch, less removed, when Grisi, Alboni, Mario, Ronconi, and Formes, made Covent Garden triumphant. Yet I would fain look upon the present as a transition-stage, and hope that the immense stimulus given both to composers and singers by the universally diffused taste for opera may restore the vanished splendours of the past. If this is to be, it must be by subduing the present fatal tendency towards theatrical encroachment on the musical element. The supremacy of music, and in music of melody, must once more be recognized, unless opera is to be dragged down to a spectacle. This will also restore singing to its rightful place; and we shall have less bawling and screaming substituted for vocalization. No one who has recently undergone operatic performances in Italy will doubt whither the present style is rapidly tending. Is it the degradation of inevitable decay? Is it the transition to a new and higher life ? 308 Contemporary Italian Poets. No. 1.-GIOVANNI PRATI. THE little village of Dasindo, in that wild and beautiful district of the Italian Tyrol called Le Giudicarie, was the birth-place of Giovanni Prati, whose name holds a very prominent place, and twenty years ago occupied one still more striking, on the list of Italy's living poets. He comes of the gentle blood of the family dei Prati, whose ancestral house, reduced within not very many years to ruins, stands, to use the words of a note to one of his poems, "in a small meadow, whose wildflowers are watered by the lonely little river Sarca, which crosses it to bathe the desolate walls." In that quiet country house, which the poet in his manhood was destined to see changed to a dismal deserted shell by fire, he was born on the 15th of January, 1815; and there, hedged in by the old-world ruralities of an out-of-the-way district, among a. loving and numerous home circle, his boyish mind and body healthily expanded, gathering strength and thoughtfulness from the grandly picturesque scenes amid which he dwelt, and which, both as child and man, he loved with passionate exclusiveness. The first year of Prati's life was that which saw the dissolution of the kingdom of Italy, and the subjection of Trent and the Italian Tyrol to the iron gripe of Austria. His family were staunch Napoleonists, and, as may be supposed, an indignant hatred for his country's new masters and oppressors early took root in the child's heart. The story goes that it was the false report of Silvio Pellico's death in the dreary dungeon of Spielberg, which flew through Italy when the poet was yet almost a baby, that first called his patriotism up in arms; for, asking his father who this Silvio was, and what he had done that everybody was sorry for him, and being told that he was a good and wise man who had tried to free his country, he innocently inquired if "loving one's country could be a crime?" and then and there received his first lesson in the political faith of his after life. Prati was sent to school at Trent, from whence he only returned home every year for an autumn holiday of a few weeks. He was a quiet, studious boy of far more than average capacity for learning; and when the vintage months brought him home laden with prizes for study and good conduct, he would pass his time in long mountain rambles, with fowling-piece and knapsack, very sparely furnished with money indeed, but always containing a well-thumbed Dante, and a tattered copy of Plutarch's Lives. Thus equipped, he delighted in clambering to the highest peaks of that mountain region; often spending the nights at the remote summer-huts of the herdsmen in the highest pastures, where he frequently paid for his humble board and lodging with the produce of his day's sport; storing his memory with snatches of the rude legends and superstitions so rife among his hosts. He met, too, in these early years, with a most remarkable amount of perilous accidents, which had no doubt their share in shadowing his mind with a certain morbid notion of fatality and predestined sorrow, which shows through all his healthier poetry. A fall from horseback down a precipice; the breaking of the ice on which he was skating; the bursting of his gun; and a stab in the arm intended by an enraged peasant for a fellow boor, at a village festival, are among his narrow escapes. At fifteen Prati left the school at Trent, where he had achieved a juvenile celebrity by his classical knowledge and his fluent writing of Latin, and went, in 1830, to the University of Padua to study the law, which, as it seems, he never practised; although in the year 1834 he took his degree as doctor in utroque jure. It was while at the university that Prati reaped his first laurels as a poet, by the lyrical improvisations which were the delight of a company of his fellow-students, who were wont to pass away the sultry summer nights in open-air instrumental concerts, sometimes in the country, sometimes beneath the windows of the city belles. Scarcely returned home from the university in 1834, Prati made a love-marriage, when yet only nineteen, with his beautiful play-fellow Elisa Bassi, a young lady of Trent, of his own age. Of three children who were born to him within the next five years, one little girl, Ersilia, alone survives. The other two, with their fair young mother, before the close of 1839, were laid at rest in the Campo Santo of Dasindo. Flying from the insupportable memories of his old home, the widower again went back to Padua, and there, urged by his friends to strive against the intellectual apathy which was gaining upon him, he composed and published Edmenegarda, his first work of any considerable length, and one that, by its somewhat Byronian sentiment and melancholy grace, kindled a veritable passion of enthusiasm throughout "Young Italy." The story is one of marriage-ties betrayed by a heroine, less guilty than unfortunate, to follow a totally unworthy seducer. The incidents of the tale are in great part true, and the fair frail heroine was no other than the sister of the noble Venetian patriot, Daniel Manin. The betrayed husband is represented in the poem as an Englishman, but this is a mere poetical fiction. The matter and the manner of this eloquent blank verse love-tale of modern life were totally new to the passionate young readers of the Peninsula, accustomed to sate their poetic hunger with the husks of worn-out classicism. Prati grew famous on the strength of this his first work, published in 1840. Two years later he went, surrounded by the nimbus of his new popularity, to live at Milan, where he speedily published three more volumes, containing his Lyrical Poems, Poems for the People, and Ballads. Among this collection may be found some of the best and most original of his works, although here and there one can hardly help tracing a flavour of imitation, as in La Fuga, and Ruello, to Bürger's Lenore; and in one or two of the ballads, to the more fantastic poems of Sir Walter Scott. In 1843, the poet quitted Milan for Turin. Austria was already looking aslant with a jealous eye at his literary success, and he justified her suspicions by making his début at Turin in some fine and spirited verses, entitled Lines written to the Order of King Charles Albert, in 1843. They were to have been set to music and sung on some public occasion, but were found to contain such a rouse to the national feeling of Italy, that the performance had the honour of being prohibited by more than one diplomatic protest. In the same year came out Prati's only prose work, the Letters to Mary. It consisted of a series of quaint and graceful art-criticisms, in which many trace a far-away likeness to some passages of Sterne's Sentimental Journey. Two new series of poems came out in the following year, 1844 : Memories and Tears-a sort of Italian In Memoriam-and New Poems, dedicated to his just widowed mother. He returned in the same year to Dasindo, where he lived for awhile with her in close retirement, till hunted thence by new misfortunes. Within a few months, he saw his dear old home destroyed by fire, his mother laid in the grave, and a beloved brother stabbed to death, while trying to separate two villagers engaged in a mortal quarrel. Stunned by these sorrows, Prati removed to Venice; and, in 1847, published at Padua two volumes of Solitary Rambles, comprising a number of lyrics which contain some of his saddest and sweetest snatches of melody. The poet flung himself with heart and soul into the revolution of 1848, when his Political Poems were chiefly written. He was, with so many other Italian patriots, a staunch believer till the last possible moment in the slippery promises of Pio Nono, and a strong constitutionalist, and admirer of the luckless Charles Albert. These political sentiments won him small favour among the hot-blooded Venetian republicans, even though he had but just escaped from the exile and fever of an Austrian dungeon, where he had been confined for months. Neither in Tuscany, where Guerazzi and Montanelli were hoisting the cap of liberty in 1849, did Prati meet with a more cordial reception. Narrow party-spirit, in those stormy days, stigmatized him as a man "sold to Piedmontese influence;" and, saddened and disgusted, he was fain to leave Florence, and make his way to Turin, where his home has since been fixed. The Political Poems contain more than one noble prophecy of the glories which now shine on his regenerated country, though then only seen dimly through the disastrous blood-mist of 1849. Rodolfo, a poem published a year or two later, portraying the adventures of a sort of Italian Don Juan of improved morals, has also a political colouring, as has his latest production of any great length, Ariberto, which numbers King Bomba and Cardinal Antonelli among its dramatis persone, and carries its hero from Marsala to Palermo, in the victorious wake of Garibaldi. Besides these works, the few last years have given birth to The Court of Riga, Satan and the Graces, and, in 1855, a variety of minor poems. A complete edition of Prati's works, including some hitherto unpublished poems, is in course of publication in parts, and will be completed, in from eight to ten volumes, in the course of next year, at Milan. As a follower (though by no means a servile one) of Manzoni, and as one of the most successful engrafters of the romantic and fantastic ballad on the poetic literature of his country, Giovanni Prati's poetry has achieved a wide and well-deserved celebrity; and the lash of his satire, falling on the loose living of many of the Roman priesthood, has won for his works the distinction of the Index Expurgatorius, and from St. Peter's throne a threat of excommunication. The following specimens are selected for translation from Prati's poems, as giving an idea of his different manners. They are necessarily chosen from among the shorter pieces, in order to present each specimen entire to the reader, and are rendered with strict fidelity not only to the sense, but to the rhyme and metre; although no small portion of the music and rhythm, of which Prati is avowedly a most skilful master, must needs evaporate in the translating : KING ALBOIN'S BANQUET. King Alboin's mighty halls are ringing With glistening gems and golden sheen, Red in the circling goblets shine The King's dark eye with evil light, They mocked this lovely land, deflowered They praised the wealth of vines which vest |