rain pattering at the poet's window, or the rattle of the carriage resuming its journey after the storm, these descriptions impress by their perfect adequacy and their complete fusion of speech and thought, and it can only be objected to them that they are finer than the moralities they usher in. So wrote the Greeks, and the recovery of an apparently lost type makes amends for the monotony of Leopardi's dismal message to mankind and the extreme limitation of his range of thought. In his later days his horizon seemed to expand; his serio-comic Paralipomeni, already noticed with other examples of its class, displays an unexpected versatility, and his last ode, La Ginestra, inspired by the hardy and humble broom-plant flourishing on the brink of the lava-fields of Vesuvius, is more original in conception and ampler in sweep than any of its predecessors. It somewhat resembles Shelley's Mont Blanc; as Shelley's Triumph of Life, with equal unconsciousness on the author's part, approximates to Leopardi's first important poem, the Appressamento alia Morte. They had here a common model in Petrarch.
Leopardi's poems, though the majority are in blank verse, may generally be defined as canzoni, either odes in the strict sense of the term, addresses to friends, impassioned outpourings of lonely thought akin to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," or apostrophes to inanimate objects, such as the moon, the natural friend of the melancholy poet, or the Vesuvian broom-plant, already mentioned. A few pieces, such as Il Primo Amore, Il Risorgimento, are autobiographical; in these Leopardi usually adopts terza rima or the ordinary rhymed metres. Personal as these pieces are in subject, they are not really more subjective than the rest. Leopardi is entirely
