Notes
"Before the Old Castle of Verona."
Printed among the "Odi Barbare" of 1889. The castle, before the frowning walls of which the poet is meditating, stands by the river Adige—which here flows through Verona—and was long the home of the great Veronese family of the Scaligers. The Church of St. Zeno, to which reference is made in the last stanza, is noted as one of the finest examples of the Romanesque in northern Italy.
"On the Death of the Prince Imperial."
A superb symphonic presentation of the whole Napoleonic tragedy, beginning with the parallel drawn in the first four stanzas between the Prince Imperial, son of Napoleon III., and the King of Rome, son of the first Napoleon; and closing with the tremendous portrayal of Letitia, mother of the race—the "Corsican Niobe"—as she stands with her "proud arms" stretched toward the "savage sea," beyond which her children have fallen. In the seventh stanza the references are to the coup d'état of Napoleon III., which occurred in December, 1852, and to the birth of the Prince Imperial in January (the "Brumaire" of the revolutionary calendar), 1856. Very characteristic is the reproach which Carducci, in the tenth stanza, addresses to the Great Napoleon;
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