To the same local boundaries and enclosed skies belongs the charm of
those buoyant words:-

Felice chi vi mira,
Ma piu felice chi per voi sospira!

And it is not only a charm of elastic sound or of grace; that would be
but a property of the turn of speech. It is rather the profounder
advantage whereby the rhymes are freighted with such feeling as the very
language keeps in store. In another tongue you may sing, "happy who
looks, happier who sighs"; but in what other tongue shall the little
meaning be so sufficient, and in what other shall you get from so weak an
antithesis the illusion of a lovely intellectual epigram? Yet it is not
worthy of an English reader to call it an illusion; he should rather be
glad to travel into the place of a language where the phrase _is_
intellectual, impassioned, and an epigram; and should thankfully for the
occasion translate himself, and not the poetry.

I have been delighted to use a present current phrase whereof the charm
may still be unknown to Englishmen--"_piuttosto bruttini_." See what
an all-Italian spirit is here, and what contempt, not reluctant, but
tolerant and familiar. You may hear it said of pictures, or works of art
of several kinds, and you confess at once that not otherwise should they
be condemned. _Brutto_--ugly--is the word of justice, the word for any
language, everywhere translatable, a circular note, to be exchanged
internationally with a general meaning, wholesale, in the course of the
European concert. But _bruttino_ is a soothing diminutive, a diminutive
that forbears to express contempt, a diminutive that implies innocence,
and is, moreover, guarded by a hesitating adverb, shrugging in the
rear--"rather than not." "Rather ugly than not, and ugly in a little way