constant watchfulness. Or it may well have been that the King and the
Salandra Government had no intention of allowing their hand in this
dangerous game to be forced by any reckless fervor of the poet. They
were not ready, yet, to countenance his inflammation. At any rate,
they left the occasion solely to the poet.

How he improved it may best be gathered from his address. To the
American reader, accustomed to a blunter appeal, the famous _Sagra_
will seem singularly uninflammatory--intensely vague, and literary.
One wonders how it could fire that, vast throng which poured out along
the Genoa road and filled the little Garibaldian town. But one must
remember that nine months of hesitation had prepared Italian minds for
the poet's theme--the future of Italy. He linked the present crisis of
choice with the heroic memories of that first making of a nation, "_Oggi
sta sulla patria un giorno di porpora; e questo e un ritorno per una
nova dipartita, o gente d'Italia!_"--A purple day is dawning for the
Fatherland and this is a return for a new departure, O people of Italy!
The return for the new departure--to make a larger, greater Italy, just
as the Thousand had departed from this spot to gather the fragments of
a nation into one. "All that you are, all that you have, and yourselves,
give it to the flame-bearing Italy!" And in conclusion he invoked in a
new beatitude the strong youth of Italy who must bear their country to
these new triumphs: "O happy those who have more because they can give
more, can burn more.... Happy those youths who are famished for glory,
because they will be appeased.... Happy the pure in heart, happy those
who return with victory, because they will see the new face of Rome,
the recrowned brow of Dante, the triumphal beauty of Italy."

The youth of Italy avidly seized upon the poet's appeal. The _Sagra_
was read in the wineshops of little villages, on the streets of the