I saw the widowed Lady of the Sea
Crownéd with corals and sea-weed and shells,
Who her long anguish and adversity
Had seemed to drown in plays and festivals.
I said: “Where is thine ancient fealty fled?--
Where is the ring with which Manin did wed
His bride?” With tearful visage she:
“An eagle with two beaks tore it from me.
Suddenly I arose, and how it came
I know not, but I heard my bridegroom's name.”
Poor widow! 't is not he. Yet he may bring--
Who knows?--back to the bride her long-lost ring.
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: