eater
part of it was composed in the wretchedness of his cell at Ferrara.
The story upon which it is founded is a very harrowing one, a king of
the Ostrogoths marrying his own sister, mistaking her for a foreign
princess; but it is treated with very inadequate tragic power, and,
like the _Aminta_, displays no real action. Its beauty chiefly
consists in its choral odes on the vanity of all earthly things, which
are exquisitely sad and touching. We hear in them the wild wail of the
poet over his own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of
glory which haloed his life. The chorus with which the tragedy winds
up--"Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore"--the words appropriately carved upon
his tombstone at St. Onofrio--is unspeakably pathetic. It is his own
dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break. It is as
untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest. If the words
are changed, the spell is lost, and the way to the heart is missed.

At last the solicitations of the most powerful princes of Italy on
Tasso's behalf overcame the tenacity of Alfonso's will, and the victim
was released; but not till he had become so weak and ill that, if the
imprisonment had continued a little longer, death would inevitably
have opened the door for him. When the order for his liberation had
been obtained, his friends made known to him by slow degrees the glad
tidings, lest a too sudden shock should prove fatal. He was now free
to go wherever he pleased, and to behold the beauties of Nature, which
had been the mirage of his prison dreams; but the elasticity of his
spirits was gone for ever; the bow had been too long bent to recover
its original spring, and the memory of his sufferings haunted him
continually, and cast a dark shadow over everything. He could not
altogether shake off the fear that he was still in Alfonso's power,
and wherever he went he fancied that an officer was in pursuit of him
to drag him back to the foul prison in St. Anne's. A modern Italian
poet, Aleardo Aleardi, has graphically described the feelings of the
gentle poet-knight, roaming, pale and dishevelled, as a mendicant from
door to door. But the sufferings that had thus maimed him bodily and
mentally had spiritually ennobled him; and there is not a more
touching incident in all history than his entreaty to be allowed to
kiss the hand of the cruel tyrant, as a last favour before leaving
Ferrara for ever, in token of his gratitude for the benefits c