THE INFINITE

That hill pushed off by itself was always dear/to me and the hedges near/it that cut away so much of the final horizon./When I would sit there lost in deliberation,/I reasoned most on the interminable spaces/beyond all hills, on their antediluvian resignation/and silence that passes/beyond man's possibility./Here for a little while my heart is quiet inside me;/and when the wind lifts roughing through the trees,/I set about comparing my silence to those voices,/and I think about the eternal, the dead seasons,/things here at hand and alive,/and all their reasons and choices./It's sweet to destroy my mind/and go down/and wreck in this sea where I drown.

--Giacomo Leopardi (Translation: Robert Lowell)

To a sensitive and imaginative man who lives, as I have lived for a long time, constantly feeling and imagining, the world and its objects are, in a way, double. He sees with his eyes a tower, a landscape; he hears with his ears the sound of a bell; and at the same time his imagination sees another tower, another bell, and hears another sound. --Giacomo Leopardi, Letters