contested the privilege, the distinction of classes, even in this form
... This revolutionary logic driven to its ultimate corollaries clouded
the poetry of life for him.... He lacked the religious idea, but the
sense of humanity in its progress and its aims, bound together by the
family, the state, liberty, glory--from this Foscolo drew his harmonies,
a new religion of the tomb."....

He touches in it on the funeral usages of different times and peoples,
with here and there an episodic allusion to the fate of heroes and
poets, and disquisitions on the aesthetic and spiritual significance
of posthumous honors. The most-admired passage of the poem is that in
which the poet turns to the monuments of Italy's noblest dead, in the
church of Santa Croce, at Florence:

The urned ashes of the mighty kindle
The great soul to great actions, Pindemonte,
And fair and holy to the pilgrim make
The earth that holds them. When I saw the tomb
Where rests the body of that great one,[1] who
Tempering the scepter of the potentate,
Strips off its laurels, and to the people shows
With what tears it doth reek, and with what blood;
When I beheld the place of him who raised
A new Olympus to the gods in Rome,[2]--
Of him[3] who saw the worlds wheel through the heights
Of heaven, illumined by the moveless sun,
And to the Anglian[4] oped the skyey ways
He swept with such a vast and tireless wing,--
O happy![5] I cried, in thy life-giving air,
And in the fountains that the Apennine