Hence that vast confidence in his
mission - a confidence born of solitude, intellectual and geographical.
Hence that ultra-terrestrial yearning which tinges his apparently
practical aspirations.
He remained at home, ever poor and industrious; wrapped in bland
exaltation and oblivious to contemporary movements of the human mind.
Not that his existence was without external activities. A chair of
Albanian literature at San Demetrio, instituted in 1849 but suppressed
after three years, was conferred on him in 1892 by the historian and
minister Pasquale Villari; for a considerable time, too, he was director
of the communal school at Corigliano, where, with characteristic energy,
he set up a printing press; violent journalistic campaigns succeeded one
another; in 1896 he arranged for the first congress of Albanian language
in that town, which brought together delegates from every part of Italy
and elicited a warm telegram of felicitation from the minister
Francesco Crispi, himself an Albanian. Again, in 1899, we find him
reading a paper before the twelfth international congress of
Orientalists at Rome.
But best of all, he loved the seclusion of Macchia.
Griefs clustered thickly about the closing years of this unworldly
dreamer. Blow succeeded blow. One by one, his friends dropped off; his
brothers, his beloved wife, his four sons - he survived them all; he
stood alone at last, a stricken figure, in tragic and sublime isolation.
Over eighty years old, he crawled thrice a week to deliver his lectures
at San Demetrio; he still cultivated a small patch of ground with
enfeebled arm, composing, for relaxation, poems and rhapsodies at the
patriarchal age of 88! They will show you the trees under which he was
wont to rest, the sunny views he loved, the very stones on which he sat;
they will tell you anecdotes of his poverty - of an indigence such as we
can scarcely credit. During the last months he was often thankful for a
crust of bread, in exchange for which he would bring a sack of acorns,
self-collected, to feed the giver's pigs. Destitution of this kind,
brought about by unswerving loyalty to an ideal, ceases to exist in its
sordid manifestations: it exalts the sufferer. And his life's work is
there. Hitherto there had been no "Albanian Question" to perplex the
chanceries of Europe. He applied the match to the tinder; he conjured up
that phantom which refuses to be laid.
He died, in 1903, at San Demetrio; and there lies entombed in the
cemetery on the hill-side, among the oaks.
But you will not easily find his grave.
His biographer indulges a poetic fancy in sketching the fair monument
which a grateful country will presently rear to his memory on the snowy
Acroceraunian heights. It might be well, meanwhile, if some simple
commemorative stone were placed on the spot where he lies buried.
