excessive disturbance, part of the remarkable precaution with which
the Government was hedging every act. But the soldiers were not needed.
The huge throng that waited hour after hour to greet the poet was not
rabble: it was a quiet, respectable, orderly concourse of Romans. There
was a preponderance of men over women, of youth over middle age, as was
natural, but so far as their behavior went, they were as self-contained
a "mob" as one might find in Berlin.

The train arrived about dusk, as the great electric lamps began to
shine above the sea of white faces. To most the arrival was evident
merely from the swaying of the dense human mass, from the cadence
of the Garibaldian Hymn that rose into the air from thousands of
throats. As room was made for the motor-car, one could see a slight
figure, a gray face, swallowed up in the surging mass. Then the crowd
broke on the run to follow the motor-car to the hotel on the Pincian
where the poet was to stay. The newspapers said there were a hundred
and fifty thousand people before the Regina Hotel in the Via Veneto
and the adjacent streets. I cannot say. All the way from the Piazza
Tritone to the Borghese Gardens, even to the Villa Malta where Prince
von Buelow lived, the crowd packed, in the hope of hearing some words
from the poet. The words of Mameli's "L'Inno" rose in the twilight
air. At last the little gray figure appeared on the balcony above the
throng....

It is impossible to give an adequate idea of the effect of what D'Annunzio
said. His words fell like moulded bronze into the stillness, one by one,
with an extraordinary distinctness, an intensity that made them vibrate
through the mass of humanity. They were filled with historical allusions
that any stranger must miss in part, but that touched the fibers of his
hearers. He seized, as he had at Quarto, on the triumphant advance of the