unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the
form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are
compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like
pieces on 'Memory', 'Habit', 'Forms', and similar unpromising
abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr.
William Watson. But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to
the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia--monuments of a moment, as
sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does,
to invisible horizons, and to the before and after--the old wooden
guardian-god recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head
laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying
ships of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra's eyes.

In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it
did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, asserted itself even in the
naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we
should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those
economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the
sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of
Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most
of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in
my work are resolved by the triple formula: in politics Italy before
all, in aesthetics classical poetry before all, in practice, frankness
and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli,
antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his
inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the
exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the
present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian
reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear
in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.