(Palma, May 14, 1848.)
And he, my brother, to the fort had gone,
And the grenade, it struck him in the breast;
He fought for liberty, and death he won,
For country here, and found in heaven rest.
And now only to follow him I sigh;
A new desire has taken me to die,--
To follow him where is no enemy,
Where every one lives happy and is free.
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.”