Adieu, Livorno! adieu, paternal walls!
Perchance I never shall behold you more!
On father's and mother's grave the shadow falls.
My love has gone under our flag to war;
And I will follow him where fortune calls;
I have had a rifle in my hands before.
The ball intended for my lover's breast,
Before he knows it my heart shall arrest;
And over his dead comrade's visage he
Shall pitying stoop, and look whom it can be.
Then he shall see and know that it is I:
Poor boy! how bitterly my love will cry!
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.