In consequence, notwithstanding much real poetical merit, it bears that fatal impress of the boudoir which disfigures so much of the best pictorial as well as poetical work of the time. Its success encouraged Prati to produce several volumes of lyrics, spirited, melodious, but too fluent. His facility, like Monti's, approached the faculty of improvisation, but Monti's tawny torrent has shrunk in Prati into a silver rill, equally swift but by no means equally majestic. He is nevertheless a poet, and in a particular manner the poet of the brief interval of hope and joy which accompanied the uprising of 1848. The national feeling of the time remains embodied in these verses, the most permanently valuable of his writings; for the more imaginative and ambitious productions of his later years, such as Satana e le Grazie or Armando, though interesting, belong to the fundamentally unsound genre of adaptation from Faust.
Another poet once in the enjoyment of a popularity which he has failed to retain is Aleardo Aleardi (1812–78). He has too much elegance and feeling to be forgotten, but wants force; his general attitude seems not inaccurately indicated in his own description of his heroine Arnalda da Roca as she appeared in the act of blowing up a shipload of Turks:
"Placidamente fulminò la palla."
The expression is rarely at the height of the sentiment to be expressed. If this can be overlooked, the reader who does not wish his emotions to run away with him may find much to admire in the languid grace of the poems, generally descriptive, didactic or idyllic, which form the most important part of Aleardi's work. It is
