THE NATIONAL IDEA IN ITALIAN LITERATURE.
I.
There is a noble poem by Carducci, Per il monumento di Dante a Trento (written in 1896), in which the soul of the Divine Poet soars up after death to the gate of Purgatory, impelled by conscience to seek the expiation of his pride before passing into the bliss of Paradise. A voice from on high tells him that the spiritual world of his vision has passed away, but God has consigned Italy to his charge; he is to watch over her destiny as a guardian spirit through the centuries, until the fulness of the times shall come:—
"Ed or s'è fermo, e par ch'aspetti, a Trento."
The national idea came to Dante as part of that essential continuity between ancient Rome and modern Italy which is the key to Italian civilisation. Virgil himself had defined the national aspirations of Italians throughout the centuries, when he placed upon the lips of Aeneas the pregnant words: Italiam quaero patriam. There was never a time, from the day on which a barbarian conqueror dethroned the last of the old Roman emperors in the west to that on which Victor Emanuel assumed the crown of the united modern kingdom, when Italy—in the notorious
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