Is the first offering into being brought:
Then stroke on stroke from out the living rock,
Its promised work the practised chisel brings,
And into life a form so graceful springs,

That none can fear for it time's rudest shock.
Such was my birth: in humble mould I lay
At first; to be by thee, oh, lady high!
Renewed, and to a work more perfect brought;
Thou giv'st what lacking is, and filest away
All roughness: yet what tortures lie,

Ere my wild heart can be restrained and taught!

SONNET ON THE DEATH OF VITTORIA.

WHEN she, the aim of every hope and prayer,
Was called by death to yon celestial spheres,
Nature, who ne'er had fashioned aught so fair,
Stood there ashamed, and all who saw shed tears.
O cruel fate, quenching the dreams of love!

O empty hopes! O spirit rare and blest!

Where art thou now? On earth thy fair limbs rest:
Thy holy thoughts have found their home above.
Yet let us think not cruel death could e'er
Have stilled the sound of all thy virtuous ways:
Lethe's oblivion could extinguish nought;
For, robbed of thee, a thousand records fair
Speak of thee yet; and death from heaven conveys
Thy powers divine, and thy immortal thought.

VOL. I. 23

GABRIELE D'ANNUNZIO.

ANNUNZIO, GABRIELE D', a realistic Italian novelist and poet; born on the yacht "Irene" in the Adriatic, near Pescara, in 1864. Educated at Prato; went to Rome in 1880; and is one of the most conspicuous Italian writers of the day. He abandoned Italian traditions for the modern French realism. His poems and novels are brilliant but sensual, the later works pessimistic. They include: "Pleasure" (1889); "The Triumph of Death" (1894); and "Maidens of the Crag" (1895). Among his poems are: "The New Song" (Rome, 1882); "Interludes of Verse" (1883); and "Marine Odes" (1893).

THE DROWNED BOY.

(From "The Triumph of Death.")

ALL of a sudden, Albadora, the septuagenarian Cybele, she who had given life to twenty-two sons and daughters, came toiling up the narrow lane into the court, and indicating the neighboring shore, where it skirted the promontory on the left, announced breathlessly:

"Down yonder there has been a child drowned!"

Candia made the sign of the cross. Giorgio arose and ascended to the loggia, to observe the spot designated. Upon the sand, below the promontory, in close vicinity to the chain of rocks and the tunnel, he perceived a blotch of white, presumably the sheet which hid the little body. A group of people had gathered around it.

As Ippolita had gone to mass with Elena at the chapel of the Port, he yielded to his curiosity and said to his entertainers : "I am going down to see."

"Why?" asked Candia.

in your heart?"

Hastening down the narrow lane, he descended by a short cut to the beach, and continued along the water. Reaching the spot, somewhat out of breath, he inquired:

"What has happened?"

The assembled peasants saluted him and made way for him. One of them answered tranquilly:

"The son of a mother has been drowned."

Another, clad in linen, who seemed to be standing guard over the corpse, bent down and drew aside the sheet.

The inert little body was revealed, extended upon the unyielding sand. It was a lad, eight or nine years old, fair and frail, with slender limbs. His head was supported on his few humble garments, rolled up in place of pillow, the shirt, the blue trousers, the red sash, the cap of limp felt. His face was but slightly livid, with flat nose, prominent forehead, and long, long lashes; the mouth was half open, with thick lips which were turning blue, between which the widely spaced teeth gleamed white. His neck was slender, flaccid as a wilted stem, and seamed with tiny creases. The jointure of the arms at the shoulder looked feeble. The arms themselves were fragile, and covered with a down similar to the fine plumage which clothes the bodies of newly hatched birds. The whole outline of the ribs was distinctly visible; down the middle of the breast the skin was divided by a darker line; the navel stood out, like a knot. The feet, slightly bloated, had assumed the same sallow color as the little hands, which were callous and strewn with warts, with white nails beginning to turn livid. On the left arm, on the thighs near the groin, and further down, on the knees and along the legs, appeared reddish blotches of scurf. Every detail of this wretched little body assumed, in the eyes of Giorgio, an extraordinary significance, immobile as it was and fixed forever in the rigidity of death.

"How was he drowned?

his voice.

Where?" he questioned, lowering

The man dressed in linen gave, with some show of impatience, the account which he had probably had to repeat too many times already. He had a brutal countenance, square-cut, with bushy brows, and a large mouth, harsh and savage. Only a little while after leading the sheep back to their stalls, the lad, taking his breakfast along with him, had gone down, together with a comrade, to bathe. He had hardly set foot in the water, when he had fallen and was drowned. At the cries of his comrade, some one from the house overhead on the bluff had hurried down, and wading in up to the knees, had dragged him from the water half dead; they had turned him upside down to make

him throw up the water, they had shaken him, but to no purpose. To indicate just how far the poor little fellow had gone in, the man picked up a pebble and threw it into the sea.

"There, only to there; at three yards from the shore!"

The sea lay at rest, breathing peacefully, close to the head of the dead child. But the sun blazed fiercely down upon the sand; and something pitiless, emanating from that sky of flame and from those stolid witnesses, seemed to pass over the pallid corpse.

"Why," asked Giorgio, "do you not place him in the shade, in one of the houses, on a bed?"

"He is not to be moved," declared the man on guard," until they hold the inquest."

"At least carry him into the shade, down there, below the embankment!"

Stubbornly the man reiterated, "He is not to be moved."

There could be no sadder sight than that frail, lifeless little being, extended on the stones, and watched over by the impassive brute who repeated his account every time in the selfsame words, and every time made the selfsame gesture, throwing a pebble into the sea:

"There; only to there."

A woman joined the group, a hook-nosed termagart, with gray eyes and sour lips, mother of the dead boy's comrade. She manifested plainly a mistrustful restlessness, as if she anticipated some accusation against her own son. She spoke with bitterness, and seemed almost to bear a grudge against the victim. "It was his destiny. God had said to him, Go into the sea, and end yourself.""

She gesticulated with vehemence. if he did not know how to swim?"

"What did he go in for

A young lad, a stranger in the district, the son of a mariner, repeated contemptuously, "Yes, what did he go in for? We, yes, who know how to swim

Other people joined the group, gazed with cold curiosity, then lingered or passed on. A crowd occupied the railroad embankment, another gathered on the crest of the promontory, as if at a spectacle. Children, seated or kneeling, played with pebbles, tossing them into the air and catching them, now on the back and now in the hollow of their hands. They all showed the same profound indifference to the presence of other people's troubles and of death.

Another woman joined the group on her way home from

mass, wearing a dress of silk and all her gold ornaments. For her also the harassed custodian repeated his account, for her also he indicated the spot in the water. She was talkative.

"I am always saying to my children, 'Don't you go into the water, or I will kill you!' The sea is the sea. Who can save

himself?"

She called to mind other instances of drowning; she called to mind the case of the drowned man with the head cut off, driven by the waves all the way to San Vito, and found among the rocks by a child.

"Here, among these rocks. He came and told us, 'There is a dead man there.' We thought he was joking. But we came and we found. He had no head. They had an inquest; he was buried in a ditch; then in the night he was dug up again. His flesh was all mangled and like jelly, but he still had his boots on. The judge said, 'See, they are better than mine!' So he must have been a rich man. And it turned out that he was a dealer in cattle. They had killed him and chopped off his head, and had thrown him into the Tronto."

She continued to talk in her shrill voice, from time to time sucking in the superfluous saliva with a slight hissing sound. "And the mother? When is the mother coming?"

At that name there arose exclamations of compassion from all the women who had gathered.

"The mother! There comes the mother, now!"

And all of them turned around, fancying that they saw her in the far distance, along the burning strand. Some of the women could give particulars about her. Her name was Riccangela; she was a widow with seven children. She had placed this one in a farmer's family, so that he might tend the sheep, and gain a morsel of bread.

One woman said, gazing down at the corpse, "Who knows how much pains the mother has taken in raising him!" Another said, "To keep the children from going hungry she has even had to ask charity."

Another told how, only a few months before, the unfortunate child had come very near strangling to death in a courtyard in a pool of water barely six inches deep. All the women repeated, "It was his destiny. He was bound to die that way."

And the suspense of waiting rendered them restless, anxious. "The mother! There comes the mother now!"

Feeling himself grow sick at heart, Giorgio exclaimed, "Can't