saprai

Updated: May 15, 2025

But Alfieri knew that there was something very wrong about himself, he felt a deficiency, a jar in his own soul; he felt, as he describes in the famous sonnet at the back of Fabre's portrait of him, that he did not know whether he was noble or base, whether he was Achilles or Thersites. "Uom, sei tu grande o vile? Mori, il saprai." Mean and great; both, I think, at once.

Vernon Lee - The Countess of Albany