Air and light and water do indeed play a large and significant part in this benign experience, and in the poetry which renders it. Water, we know, had peculiar allurements for his imagination; but now the obsession of fleets and arsenals is overcome, and he looks out over the wide levels of the Arno mouth, where fishing boats with their hanging nets are seen, transfigured in the effulgence of the west, like cups or lilies of flame upon the water; or ‘on a June evening after rain,’ when ‘the gracious sky, tenderly gazing at her image in the earth she has refreshed, laughs out from a thousand mirrors.’ The solidity of the material world seems to remain only in its most delicate and attenuated forms—the crescent moon ‘slender as the eyebrow of a girl,’ the lean boughs and tapering leaves of the olive, the seashore sand, not ‘ribbed’ as Wordsworth put it, but delicately traced like the palate or the finger-tip. The poet is visibly striving through these frail and delicate things to escape his obsession into a realm of spirit he divines, but cannot reach:

This is the language of no sensualist, but of a mystic. And d’Annunzio in these poems again and again approaches the poetic mysticism of Wordsworth, and of Shelley and Dante. As he watches the dewy loveliness of evening, the earth seems to dissolve in the ‘infinite smile,’ which for Shelley ‘kindled the universe’;[25] and for the Italian it is the smile of Beatrice. In the child, who hardly exists for him before, the poet of pitiless virility now sees not only ‘the father of the man,’ but the soul implicitly aware of the Truth we only guess at:

There are hints, perhaps reminiscences, of Wordsworth here; but d’Annunzio’s more obvious affinity is doubtless with Shelley, whose Roman grave he saluted in an ode of lofty eulogy and sculptured grace.

The lyric eloquence of Alcione undoubtedly recalls the rush of Shelley’s music and the æthereal liquidity of his style. Yet they touch across a gulf of profound disparity. D’Annunzio, for all his preoccupation with air and light and water, never, either as man or as artist, escapes the earth. The hard stuff of his egoism is never really transmuted in the flame of love; nor does the clear and delicate precision of his style ever really dissolve in radiant suffusion. D’Annunzio’s nature-world, like Shelley’s, is peopled with imagined shapes, in which the myths of old Greece are created anew. But here too their divergence asserts itself. Shelley’s Prometheus is not really earth-born, and his Asia is the hardly embodied symbol of the ideal passion of his own soul. While d’Annunzio’s Triton and Dryad are recognizably akin to the sea or woodland life they spring from, hued like the salt deep, and full of the sap of earth. D’Annunzio is the greater artist, Shelley the finer and the rarer soul.

But these gracious idylls were, as has been hinted, an episode. Nature could not replace man; beyond ‘earth’ and ‘sea’ and ‘sky,’ the ‘heroes,’ and especially the heroes and heroic memories of Italy, called for his ‘praise.’ Here, he felt, was the home of his spirit. The gracious valley of Arno might be

The Elettra, the second book of the Laudi, is mainly devoted to the memories of these vanished glories. The resonant herald of the Third Italy wanders, for instance, among the ‘Cities of Silence’—decayed, half grass-grown capitals of vanished dukes and extinct republics—Ferrara, Pisa, Pistoja; oldest and grandest of all, Ravenna, the ‘deep ship’s hull, heavy with the iron weight of empire, driven by shipwreck on the utmost bounds of the world.’[27] Of the sequence of lyrics on the great enterprise of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand,’ La Notte di Caprera, it is enough to say that it is worthy of being put beside Carducci’s Ode. After a quarter of a century Garibaldi’s glory was no whit dimmed. On the contrary, Italians who knew how many gross blots defiled the Italy he had helped to win, saw Garibaldi as a figure of ideal splendour and purity on the further side of a foul morass. The bitter disillusion of such minds is powerfully painted in the moving piece: ‘To One of the Thousand.’ An old Garibaldian sailor brings his broken anchor-cable to the ship cordwainer to be mended. He looks on, sombre, dejected, silent, but thinking what he does not say; and his thoughts are like this:

But Rome, the eternal City, could only obscure her destiny, not efface it; disillusion founded on her moments of self-oblivion was itself the vainest of illusions. That is the faith of the new Italian Renascence, and d’Annunzio, the fiercest chastiser of her oblivious fatuities, attains his loftiest note of ‘praise’ in the Ode which prophetically arrays Rome in glory as the future centre of the embodied Power of Man.

It is based on the legend, told by Ovid,[29] of the ship of the Great Mother, stranded in the Tiber mud, and drawn to shore by the Vestal Virgin Claudia Quinta. The opening stanzas tell the story—the dearth in the city, the Sibylline oracle’s counsel to bring the image of the Mater Magna, the arrival of her ship in the river, the stranding in the mud, the vain efforts of the entire city to extricate it, until a Vestal Virgin, without an effort, draws it to bank. Then the poet interprets the symbolic legend:

On this note, the climax of his boundless national faith, we will leave d’Annunzio. We are apt to think that the tide of humanity has ebbed decisively away from the city of the seven hills, and that wherever its sundered streams may be destined finally to flow together in unison, the Roman Forum, where the roads of all the world once met, will not be that spot. Yet a city which can generate magnificent, even if illusory, dreams is assured of a real potency in human affairs not to be challenged in its kind by far greater and wealthier cities which the Londoner, or the New Yorker, or even the Parisian, would never think of addressing in these lyrical terms.

Few men so splendidly endowed as d’Annunzio have given the world so much occasion for resentment and for ridicule. His greatest gifts lend themselves with fatal ease to abuse; his ‘vast sensuality’ and his iron nerve sometimes co-operate and enforce one another in abortions of erotics and ferocity. But the same gifts, in other phases, become the creative and controlling elements of his sumptuous style. His boundless wealth of sensuous images provides the gorgeous texture of its ever changing woof. But its luxury is controlled by tenacious purpose; the sentences, however richly arrayed, move with complete lucidity of aim to their goal; the surface is pictorial, but the structure is marble. Thus this Faun of genius, as he seems under one aspect, compounded with the Quixotic adventurer, as he seems under another, meet in one of the supreme literary artists of the Latin race; a creator of beauty which, however Latin in origin and cast, has the quality that strikes home across the boundaries of race, and has already gone far to make its author not merely the protagonist of the Latin renascence, but a European classic.