eloved Leonora, with the dire and
undignified result that all the world knows. Tasso's second visit took
place not long before his death, when his strength was rapidly failing, so
that it seems strange that he did not decide to end his days amidst these
lovely and well-remembered scenes of his early boyhood, instead of
deliberately choosing for the last stage of his earthly journey the Roman
convent of Sant' Onofrio, where the death-chamber and various pathetic
relics of the poet are still pointed out.

Students of Tasso's immortal epic are apt to overlook the immense
influence exercised on its author by his early Sorrentine days and
surroundings. The _Gerusalemme Liberata_ contains, as we know, a full
account of the First Crusade and constitutes an apotheosis of Godfrey de
Bouillon, first Christian King of Jerusalem; but it is also something more
than a mere poetical description of a departed age of chivalry. For there
can be little doubt that the poet aspired to be the singer of a new
movement which should wrest back the Holy City from the clutches of the
Saracens, and set a second Godfrey upon the vacant throne of Palestine. To
this important end the experiences of his infancy and his training by the
Jesuits had undoubtedly tended to urge the precocious young poet. The
servants of his father's house at Sorrento must many a time have regaled
his eager boyish mind with harrowing tales of the infidel pirates who
scoured the Tyrrhene Sea within sight of the watch-towers on the coast;
within ken, perchance, of Casa Tasso itself, perched on the commanding
cliff above the waters. Scarcely a family dwelling on the Marina below but
was mourning one or more of its members that had been seized by the
blood-thirsty marauders, perhaps to be brutally slain on the spot or to
languish in the dungeons of Tripoli and Smyrna, eking out a life of
slavery that was far worse than death itself. Stories of tortured
Christians, like that of the pious Geronimo of Algiers who was tied with
cords and flung into a mass of soft concrete, were common enough topics
among the Sorrentine folk, all of whom lived in constant dread of a
successful raid by the Barbary pirates. For, despite the efforts of the
great Emperor Charles the Fifth to protect his maritime subjects, the
swift galleys of Tunis and Tripoli out-stripped the Imperial men-of-war,
and continued to carry on their vile commerce of slavery. Such a state of
terrorism must have appeared intol