In the month of March, 1848, news came to Rome of the insurrection in Vienna, and a multitude of the citizens assembled to bear the tidings to the Austrian Ambassador, who resided in the ancient palace of the Venetian Republic. The throng swept down the Corso, gathering numbers as it went, and paused in the open space before the Palazzo di Venezia. At its summons, the ambassador abandoned his quarters, and fled without waiting to hear the details of the intelligence from Vienna. The people, incited by a number of Venetian exiles, tore down the double-headed eagle from the portal, and carried it for a more solemn and impressive destruction to the Piazza del Popolo, while a young poet erased the inscription asserting the Austrian claim to the palace, and wrote in its stead the words, “Palazzo della Dieta Italiana.”

The sentiment of national unity expressed in this legend had been the ruling motive of the young poet Francesco Dall' Ongaro's life, and had already made his name famous through the patriotic songs that were sung all over Italy. Garibaldi had chanted one of his Stornelli when embarking from Montevideo in the spring of 1848 to take part in the Italian revolutions, of which these little ballads had become the rallying-cries; and if the voice of the people is in fact inspired, this poet could certainly have claimed the poet's long-lost honors of prophecy, for it was he who had shaped their utterance. He had ceased to assume any other sacred authority, though educated a priest, and at the time when he devoted the Palazzo di Venezia to the idea of united Italy, there was probably no person in Rome less sacerdotal than he.

Francesco Dall' Ongaro was born in 1808, at an obscure hamlet in the district of Oderzo in the Friuli, of parents who were small freeholders. They removed with their son in his tenth year to Venice, and there he began his education for the Church in the Seminary of the Madonna della Salute. The tourist who desires to see the Titians and Tintorettos in the sacristy of this superb church, or to wonder at the cold splendors of the interior of the temple, is sometimes obliged to seek admittance through the seminary; and it has doubtless happened to more than one of my readers to behold many little sedate old men in their teens, lounging up and down the cool, humid courts there, and trailing their black priestly robes over the springing mold. The sun seldom strikes into that sad close, and when the boys form into long files, two by two, and march out for recreation, they have a torpid and melancholy aspect, upon which the daylight seems to smile in vain. They march solemnly up the long Zattere, with a pale young father at their head, and then march solemnly back again, sweet, genteel, pathetic specters of childhood, and reËnter their common tomb, doubtless unenvied by the hungriest and raggedest street boy, who asks charity of them as they pass, and hoarsely whispers “Raven!” when their leader is beyond hearing. There is no reason to suppose that a boy, born poet among the mountains, and full of the wild and free romance of his native scenes, could love the life led at the Seminary of the Salute, even though it included the study of literature and philosophy. From his childhood Dall' Ongaro had given proofs of his poetic gift, and the reverend ravens of the seminary were unconsciously hatching a bird as little like themselves as might be. Nevertheless, Dall' Ongaro left their school to enter the University of Padua as student of theology, and after graduating took orders, and went to Este, where he lived some time as teacher of belles-lettres.

At Este his life was without scope, and he was restless and unhappy, full of ardent and patriotic impulses, and doubly restricted by his narrow field and his priestly vocation. In no long time he had trouble with the Bishop of Padua, and, abandoning Este, seems also to have abandoned the Church forever. The chief fruit of his sojourn in that quaint and ancient village was a poem entitled II VenerdÌ Santo, in which he celebrated some incidents of the life of Lord Byron, somewhat as Byron would have done. Dall' Ongaro's poems, however, confess the influence of the English poet less than those of other modern Italians, whom Byron infected so much more than his own nation.

From Este, Dall' Ongaro went to Trieste, where he taught literature and philosophy, wrote for the theater, and established a journal in which, for ten years, he labored to educate the people in his ideas of Italian unity and progress. That these did not coincide with the ideas of most Italian dreamers and politicians of the time may be inferred from the fact that he began in 1846 a course of lectures on Dante, in which he combated the clerical tendencies of Gioberti and Balbo, and criticised the first acts of Pius IX. He had as profound doubt of Papal liberality as Niccolini, at a time when other patriots were fondly cherishing the hope of a united Italy under an Italian pontiff; and at Rome, two years later, he sought to direct popular feeling from the man to the end, in one of the earliest of his graceful Stornelli.

During these years at Trieste, however, Dall' Ongaro seems to have been also much occupied with pure literature, and to have given a great deal of study to the sources of national poetry, as he discovered them in the popular life and legends. He had been touched with the prevailing romanticism; he had written hymns like Manzoni, and, like Carrer, he sought to poetize the traditions and superstitions of his countrymen. He found a richer and deeper vein than the Venetian poet among his native hills and the neighboring mountains of Slavonia, but I cannot say that he wrought it to much better effect. The two volumes which he published in 1840 contain many ballads which are very graceful and musical, but which lack the fresh spirit of songs springing from the popular heart, while they also want the airy and delicate beauty of the modern German ballads. Among the best of them are two which Dall' Ongaro built up from mere lines and fragments of lines current among the people, as in later years he more successfully restored us two plays of Menander from the plots and a dozen verses of each. “One may imitate,” he says, “more or less fortunately, Manzoni, Byron, or any other poet, but not the simple inspirations of the people. And 'The Pilgrim who comes from Rome,' and the 'Rosettina,' if one could have them complete as they once were, would probably make me blush for my elaborate variations.” But study which was so well directed, and yet so conscious of its limitations, could not but be of great value; and Dall' Ongaro, no doubt, owed to it his gift of speaking so authentically for the popular heart. That which he did later showed that he studied the people's thought and expression con amore, and in no vain sentiment of dilettanteism, or antiquarian research, or literary patronage.

It is not to be supposed that Dall' Ongaro's literary life had at this period an altogether objective tendency. In the volumes mentioned, there is abundant evidence that he was of the same humor as all men of poetic feeling must be at a certain time of life. Here are pretty verses of occasion, upon weddings and betrothals, such as people write in Italy; here are stanzas from albums, such as people used to write everywhere; here are didactic lines; here are bursts of mere sentiment and emotion. In the volume of Fantasie, published at Florence in 1866, Dall' Ongaro collected some of the ballads from his early works, but left out the more subjective effusions.

I give one of these in which, under a fantastic name and in a fantastic form, the poet expresses the tragic and pathetic interest of the life to which he was himself vowed.

II

It will here satisfy the strongest love of contrasts to turn from Dall' Ongaro the sentimental poet to Dall' Ongaro the politician, and find him on his feet and making a speech at a public dinner given to Richard Cobden at Trieste, in 1847. Cobden was then, as always, the advocate of free trade, and Dall' Ongaro was then, as always, the advocate of free government. He saw in the union of the Italians under a customs-bond the hope of their political union, and in their emancipation from oppressive imposts their final escape from yet more galling oppression. He expressed something of this, and, though repeatedly interrupted by the police, he succeeded in saying so much as to secure his expulsion from Trieste.

Italy was already in a ferment, and insurrections were preparing in Venice, Milan, Florence, and Rome; and Dall' Ongaro, consulting with the Venetian leaders Manin and Tommaseo, retired to Tuscany, and took part in the movements which wrung a constitution from the Grand Duke, and preceded the flight of that prince. In December he went to Rome, where he joined himself with the Venetian refugees and with other Italian patriots, like D'Azeglio and Durando, who were striving to direct the popular mind toward Italian unity. The following March he was, as we have seen, one of the exiles who led the people against the Palazzodi Venezia. In the mean time the insurrection of the glorious Five Days had taken place at Milan, and the Lombard cities, rising one after another, had driven out the Austrian garrisons. Dall' Ongaro went from Rome to Milan, and thence, by advice of the revolutionary leaders, to animate the defense against the Austrians in Friuli; one of his brothers was killed at Palmanuova, and another severely wounded. Treviso, whither he had retired, falling into the hands of the Germans, he went to Venice, then a republic under the presidency of Manin; and here he established a popular journal, which opposed the union of the struggling republic with Piedmont under Carlo Alberto. Dall' Ongaro was finally expelled and passed next to Ravenna, where he found Garibaldi, who had been banished by the Roman government, and was in doubt as to how he might employ his sword on behalf of his country. In those days the Pope's moderately liberal minister, Rossi, was stabbed, and Count Pompeo Campello, an old literary friend and acquaintance of Dall' Ongaro, was appointed minister of war. With Garibaldi's consent the poet went to Rome, and used his influence to such effect that Garibaldi was authorized to raise a legion of volunteers, and was appointed general of those forces which took so glorious a part in the cause of Italian Independence. Soon after, when the Pope fled to Gaeta, and the Republic was proclaimed, Dall' Ongaro and Garibaldi were chosen representatives of the people. Then followed events of which it is still a pang keen to read: the troops of the French Republic marched upon Rome, and, after a defense more splendid and heroic than any victory, the city fell. The Pope returned, and all who loved Italy and freedom turned in exile from Rome. The cities of the Romagna, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venetia had fallen again under the Pope, the Grand Duke, and the Austrians, and Dall' Ongaro took refuge in Switzerland.

{Illustration: FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARA}

Without presuming to say whether Dall' Ongaro was mistaken in his political ideas, we may safely admit that he was no wiser a politician than Dante or Petrarch. He was an anti-Papist, as these were, and like these he opposed an Italy of little principalities and little republics. But his dream, unlike theirs, was of a great Italian democracy, and in 1848-49 he opposed the union of the Italian patriots under Carlo Alberto, because this would have tended to the monarchy.

III

But it is not so much with Dall' Ongaro's political opinions that we have to do as with his poetry of the revolutionary period of 1848, as we find in it the little collection of lyrics which he calls “Stornelli.” These commemorate nearly all the interesting aspects of that epoch; and in their wit and enthusiasm and aspiration, we feel the spirit of a race at once the most intellectual and the most emotional in the world, whose poets write as passionately of politics as of love. Arnaud awards Dall' Ongaro the highest praise, and declares him “the first to formulate in the common language of Italy patriotic songs which, current on the tongues of the people, should also remain the patrimony of the national literature.... In his popular songs,” continues this critic, “Dall' Ongaro has given all that constitutes true, good, and—not the least merit—novel poetry. Meter and rhythm second the expression, imbue the thought with harmony, and develop its symmetry.... How enviable is that perspicuity which does not oblige you to re-read a single line to evolve therefrom the latent idea!” And we shall have no less to admire the perfect art which, never passing the intelligence of the people, is never ignoble in sentiment or idea, but always as refined as it is natural.

I do not know how I could better approach our poet than by first offering this lyric, written when, in 1847, the people of Leghorn rose in arms to repel a threatened invasion of the Austrians.

The Italian editor of the “Stornelli” does not give the closing lines too great praise when he declares that “they say more than all the lament of Tancred over Clorinda.” In this little flight of song, we pass over more tragedy than Messer Torquato could have dreamed in the conquest of many Jerusalems; for, after all, there is nothing so tragic as fact. The poem is full at once of the grand national impulse, and of purely personal and tender devotion; and that fluttering, vehement purpose, thrilling and faltering in alternate lines, and breaking into a sob at last, is in every syllable the utterance of a woman's spirit and a woman's nature.

Quite as womanly, though entirely different, is this lament, which the poet attributes to his sister for their brother, who fell at Palmanuova, May 14, 1848.

All hope and purpose are gone from this woman's heart, for whom Italy died in her brother, and who has only these artless, half-bewildered words of regret to speak, and speaks them as if to some tender and sympathetic friend acquainted with all the history going before their abrupt beginning. I think it most pathetic and natural, also, that even in her grief and her aspiration for heaven, her words should have the tint of her time, and she should count freedom among the joys of eternity.

Quite as womanly again, and quite as different once more, is the lyric which the reader will better appreciate when I remind him how the Austrians massacred the unarmed people in Milan, in January, 1848, and how, later, during the Five Days, they murdered their Italian prisoners, sparing neither sex nor age.{1}

Note {1}: “Many foreigners,” says Emilie Dandolo, in his restrained and temperate history of “I Volontarii e Bersaglieri Lombardi”, “have cast a doubt upon the incredible ferocity of the Austrians during the Five Days, and especially before evacuating the city. But, alas! the witnesses are too many to be doubted. A Croat was seen carrying a babe transfixed upon his bayonet. All know of those women's hands and ears found in the haversacks of the prisoners; of those twelve unhappy men burnt alive at Porta Tosa; of those nineteen buried in a lime-pit at the Castello, whose scorched bodies we found. I myself, ordered with a detachment, after the departure of the enemy, to examine the Castello and neighborhood, was horror-struck at the sight of a babe nailed to a post.”

The repressed horror in the lines,

is the sentiment of a picture that presents the scene to the reader's eye as this shuddering woman saw it; and the heart of woman's fierceness and hate is in that fragment of drama with which the brief poem closes. It is the history of an epoch. That epoch is now past, however; so long and so irrevocably past, that Dall' Ongaro commented in a note upon the poem: “The word 'German' is left as a key to the opinions of the time. Human brotherhood has been greatly promoted since 1848. German is now no longer synonymous with enemy. Italy has made peace with the peoples, and is leagued with them all against their common oppressors.”

There is still another of these songs, in which the heart of womanhood speaks, though this time with a voice of pride and happiness.

This poem, like that of La Livornese and La Donna Lombarda, is a vivid picture: it is a liberated city, and the streets are filled with jubilant people; the first victorious combats have taken place, and it is a wounded hero who passes with his ribbon on his breast. As the fond crowd gives way to him, his young wife looks on him from her window with an exultant love, unshadowed by any possibility of harm:

This is country and freedom to her,—this is strength which despots cannot break,—this is joy to which defeat and ruin can never come nigh! It might be any one of the sarcastic and quickwitted people talking politics in the streets of Rome in 1847, who sees the newly elected Senator—the head of the Roman municipality, and the legitimate mediator between Pope and people—as he passes, and speaks to him in these lines the dominant feeling of the moment:

An impulse of the time is strong again in the following Stornello,—a cry of reproach that seems to follow some recreant from a beleaguered camp of true comrades, and to utter the feeling of men who marched to battle through defection, and were strong chiefly in their just cause. It bears the date of that fatal hour when the king of Naples, after a brief show of liberality, recalled his troops from Bologna, where they had been acting against Austria with the confederated forces of the other Italian states, and when every man lost to Italy was as an ebbing drop of her life's blood.

And this song, so fine in its picturesque and its dramatic qualities, is not less true to the hope of the Venetians when they rose in 1848, and intrusted their destinies to Daniele Manin.

The Venetians of that day dreamed that San Marco might live again, and the fineness and significance of the poem could not have been lost on the humblest in Venice, where all were quick to beauty and vividly remembered that the last Doge who wedded the sea was named, like the new President, Manin.

I think the Stornelli of the revolutionary period of 1848 have a peculiar value, because they embody, in forms of artistic perfection, the evanescent as well as the enduring qualities of popular feeling. They give us what had otherwise been lost, in the passing humor of the time. They do not celebrate the battles or the great political occurrences. If they deal with events at all, is it with events that express some belief or longing,—rather with what people hoped or dreamed than with what they did. They sing the Friulan volunteers, who bore the laurel instead of the olive during Holy Week, in token that the patriotic war had become a religion; they remind us that the first fruits of Italian longing for unity were the cannons sent to the Romans by the Genoese; they tell us that the tricolor was placed in the hand of the statue of Marcus Aurelius at the Capitol, to signify that Rome was no more, and that Italy was to be. But the Stornelli touch with most effect those yet more intimate ties between national and individual life that vibrate in the hearts of the Livornese and the Lombard woman, of the lover who sees his bride in the patriotic colors, of the maiden who will be a sister of charity that she may follow her lover through all perils, of the mother who names her new-born babe Costanza in the very hour of the Venetian republic's fall. And I like the Stornelli all the better because they preserve the generous ardor of the time, even in its fondness and excess.

After the fall of Rome, the poet did not long remain unmolested even in his Swiss retreat. In 1852 the Federal Council yielded to the instances of the Austrian government, and expelled Dall' Ongaro from the Republic. He retired with his sister and nephew to Brussels, where he resumed the lectures upon Dante, interrupted by his exile from Trieste in 1847, and thus supported his family. Three years later he gained permission to enter France, and up to the spring-time of 1859 he remained in Paris, busying himself with literature, and watching events with all an exile's eagerness. The war with Austria broke out, and the poet seized the long-coveted opportunity to return to Italy, whither he went as the correspondent of a French newspaper. On the conclusion of peace at Villafranca, this journal changed its tone, and being no longer in sympathy with Dall' Ongaro's opinions, he left it. Baron Ricasoli, to induce him to make Tuscany his home, instituted a chair of comparative dramatic literature in connection with the University of Pisa, and offered it to Dall' Ongaro, whose wide general learning and special dramatic studies peculiarly qualified him to hold it. He therefore took up his abode at Florence, dedicating his main industry to a comparative course of ancient and modern dramatic literature, and writing his wonderful restorations of Menander's “Phasma” and “Treasure”. He was well known to the local American and English Society, and was mourned by many friends when he died there, some ten years ago.

As with Dall' Ongaro literature had always been but an instrument for the redemption of Italy, even after his appointment to a university professorship he did not forget this prime object. In nearly all that he afterwards wrote, he kept the great aim of his life in view, and few of the events or hopes of that dreary period of suspense and abortive effort between the conclusion of peace at Villafranca and the acquisition of Venice went unsung by him. Indeed, some of his most characteristic “Stornelli” belong to this epoch. After Savoy and Nice had been betrayed to France, and while the Italians waited in angry suspicion for the next demand of their hated ally, which might be the surrender of the island of Sardinia or the sacrifice of the Genoese province, but which no one could guess in the impervious Napoleonic silence, our poet wrote:

The flight of the Grand Duke from Florence in 1859, and his conciliatory address to his late subjects after Villafranca, in which by fair promises he hoped to win them back to their allegiance; the union of Tuscany with the kingdom of Italy; the removal of the Austrian flags from Milan; Garibaldi's crusade in Sicily; the movement upon Rome in 1862; Aspromonte,—all these events, with the shifting phases of public feeling throughout that time, the alternate hopes and fears of the Italian nation, are celebrated in the later Stornelli of Dall' Ongaro. Venice has long since fallen to Italy; and Rome has become the capital of the nation. But the unification was not accomplished till Garibaldi, who had done so much for Italy, had been wounded by her king's troops in his impatient attempt to expel the French at Aspromonte.

Let us conclude these notices with one of the Stornelli which is non-political, but which I think we won't find the less agreeable for that reason. I like it because it says a pretty thing or two very daintily, and is interfused with a certain arch and playful spirit which is not so common but we ought to be glad to recognize it.

I have already noted the more obvious merits of the Stornelli, and I need not greatly insist upon them. Their defects are equally plain; one sees that their simplicity all but ceases to be a virtue at times, and that at times their feeling is too much intellectualized. Yet for all this we must recognize their excellence, and the skill as well as the truth of the poet. It is very notable with what directness he expresses his thought, and with what discretion he leaves it when expressed. The form is always most graceful, and the success with which dramatic, picturesque, and didactic qualities are blent, for a sole effect, in the brief compass of the poems, is not too highly praised in the epithet of novelty. Nothing is lost for the sake of attitude; the actor is absent from the most dramatic touches, the painter is not visible in lines which are each a picture, the teacher does not appear for the purpose of enforcing the moral. It is not the grandest poetry, but is true feeling, admirable art.