Romance of Roman Villas (The Renaissance)

Ere he could take it from her hand, however, with a snort and bellow like that of a bull, my lord Aldobrandino faced the Queen.

"Gramercy," he cried, "shall so fair a prize be won foully by false plagiarism?"

"What charge is this you make," demanded Queen Eleanor.

"That yon traitor stole from me that songlet of the peach, and though he has trussed it out of countenance with gawds of his own invention still the root of the matter is mine."

"What answer you to this accusation, Richard?" asked the Queen.

"That he speaks truly," Richard replied, "mine is indeed a spilling cup."

The queen was loth to give judgment against her favourite and there was wrangling between her advisors as to what amount of theft were admissible in literature, but their opinion was stricter than I pray yours may be, most gentle reader, and they gave their verdict, "The prize is to Prince Aldobrandino."

At that verdict Sancie fainted in the arms of Queen Marguerite, and Richard hid his face in his hands, crying, "I cannot bear it."

Then Prince Aldobrandino spoke and they saw how they had misjudged the man.

"You cannot bear this disappointment, say you, Ricciardo? Look you at the device upon my shield, Atlas, and the motto, Sustino omnes. I can bear all things, even such loss as this, and, since I see well that the lady loves me not, of my own motive yield I the prize to you, Ricciardo, who well deserve what you have truly won."

"Nay," cried Richard, for admiration of so great magnanimity fired his emulation, and he would not be outdone. "Nay, my lord, the judgment of this court cannot be thus lightly set aside. 'The prize' it has decreed, 'must be to Prince Aldobrandino.' Thy oath also that the Lady Sancie shall be mother of the Aldobrandini is registered in heaven."

"I would forfeit neither prize nor oath," replied Aldobrandino, "but there is a scripture on which I have pondered much of late—'Who knoweth,' quoth the wise man, 'who shall reign after thee, and whether thy son shall be a fool?' So might he well be if he resembled me, and against such ill-chancing will I now be assured. A son after my own heart do I find in thee, Ricciardo, for I have probed and proved thee, taking the measure of thy mind until I know thee clean of soul as thou art strong of body. I go in fulfilment of a secret vow, neither recently nor lightly made, to end my days with the brotherhood of St. Benedict, but first I do adopt thee son, and heir to all my estates. Let the judgment of this court stand and the prize be to Prince Aldobrandino for henceforth that is thy name and title."

The good man could not be swerved from this resolution. The lawyers drew up the act of relinquishment, Archbishop Boniface blessed the happy pair, who spent their honeymoon in their villa at Frascati, and from thence was Richard called by election to be King of the Romans. It was an honour which he held not long, nor did children of his continue the line of the Aldobrandini. Too careless was he of his own advantage when it ran counter to the desires of another; but in the magnificent Frascati villa, where he made such short tarrying, you may still find Richard's fountain not far from that of Atlas.

To his estates in Cornwall he shortly returned; and testimony to his character corroborative of this story, and as credible as that of the Italian authorities we have quoted (Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni), you may read in the ballad of

ERL RICHARD, KING OF GOOD FELLOWS.

"His wine was for others' sipping,
For lightly he gave it up,
There's slipping 'twixt pouring and lipping
And his was a spilling cup.

"But ne'er for the lost good liquor
Was Richard heard to sigh.
'I shall not bicker so friends grow thicker,
And the cup of love hold I.'

"So in praise of that loser willing
They carved his cup awry,—
Spilling——but aye re-filling
To witness if I lie!"

WITH TASSO AT VILLA D'ESTE

His weary heart awhile to soothe
He wove all into verses smooth.
. . . . . . .
for soothly he
Was deemed a craft-master to be
In those most noble days of old,
Whose lays were e'en as kingly gold
To our thin brass or drossy lead;
Well, e'en so all the tale is said
How twain grew one and came to bliss?
Woe's me, an idle dream it is!

William Morris.

SUPREME above all the enchanted gardens of Italy, both in the bewildering beauty of its sensuous charm and in the potency of its appeal to the imagination, stands the Villa d'Este at Tivoli.

It is a hillside villa, a succession of terraces forming a stairway of flowers between the palace and the lower garden, where

"Cypress and fig tree and orange in tier upon tier still repeated,
Rose-garden on garden upheaved in balconies step to the sky."

But it is also a superb water-staircase, for the river Anio, turned from its course by a gigantic feat of engineering, leaps in a magnificent cascade, laughs in the spray of a thousand fountain jets, and makes the bosquets which shadow the regal staircase a haunt of the water nymphs as well as of the Dryads. You fancy, as your unwary foot presses the concealed springs that it is the white hands of mischievous Naiads which dash the water in your face, a pensive melancholy settles upon you with the mysterious dusk, and you are startled by Undine's "short, quick sobs," and are loth to believe that the plaintive sounds with which the air pulses are but the dropping of rills in and out of the shadowy pools.

The pompous hydraulic organ no longer thunders its "full-mouthed diapason," but the nightingales fill the long summer nights with their surges of wild rhapsodies. Both the eye and the ear of the artist receive refreshment and stimulus here. The garden is a bath of verdancy and coolness even upon the most torrid day. The very light which filters through the dense foliage is tinged with green. The marbles are velvety and moist with moss, and the maidenhair fern drips lush and dank. Here Liszt drew inspiration from the harmonies of water notes blended with the chiming of distant bells, and Watteau showed in the many studies which he made in the garden how potent was its influence in investing his fêtes champêtres with the grace of the idyl.

That its appeal was no less powerful to a poet, the "craft-master" of his day, it is our purpose later to show.

Many minor poets also have felt and, with more or less success, have interpreted its wondrous charm—Story perhaps best of all.

"What peace and quiet in this villa sleep!
Here let us pause nor chase for pleasure on,
Nothing can be more exquisite than this.
See how the old house lifts its face of light
Against the pallid olives that between
Throng up the hill. Look down this vista's shade
Of dark square-shaven ilexes where sports
The fountain's, thin white thread and blows away.
And mark! along the terraced balustrade
Two contadini stopping in the shade
With copper vases poised upon their heads,
How their red jackets tell against the green!
Old, all is old,—what charm there is in age!
Do you believe this villa when 'twas new
Was half so beautiful as now it seems?
Look at these balustrades of travertine—
Had they the charm when fresh and shapely carved
As now that they are stained and graved with time
And mossed with lichens, every grim old mask
That grins upon their pillars bearded o'er
With waving sprays of slender maidenhair?
Ah, no! I cannot think it; things of art
Snatch nature's graces from the hand of Time."

But it is the view afforded by the double arcade of loggias and by every window of the palace façade which was the crowning glory of the villa. The amethystine Sabine Hills and the immense Campagna encircle the Eternal City, from whose mists the dome of Saint Peter's seems to rise a buoyant, iridescent bubble.

It was Pirro Ligorio (architect also of the exquisite Villa Pia) who in 1545 accomplished the miracle of converting the savage cliff into a staircase of enchantment. Nature had given the villa its marvellous site and genius availed itself of all the resources of art and wealth to effect the wonder.

Cardinal Ippolito's orders to Ligorio were: "Surpass the work of Vignola in the villas of Caprarola and Lante. Restore the glory of Tivoli in the Augustan age."

Excavations in the neighbourhood were daily bringing to light masterpieces of classical sculpture, and for the "statues which whiten the shadow" of Villa d'Este, Ligorio was given carte blanche to despoil the gardens of Hadrian's palace. To-day only a long procession of broken pedestals bears witness to statues of emperors, gods, and goddesses long since removed to different museums.

The exodus began immediately upon the succession of Ippolito's nephew, Cardinal Luigi d'Este, who came to his inheritance deeply in debt; but that spendthrift prelate retained sixty statues, some of which are seen in the etching made by Piranesi, and it was not until 1745 that these were purchased by Cardinal Albani.

The creator of this paradise, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este II., son of Lucrezia Borgia, was, like his villa, a refined product of the later Renaissance and must not be confounded with his uncle, Cardinal Ippolito d'Este I.

This first Cardinal Ippolito was a man of very different fibre, as may be seen from a single incident. Sent to Rome as his brother's envoy, on the occasion of Duke Alphonso's marriage, he fell in love with a pretty cousin of Lucrezia Borgia who accompanied the bride on her wedding journey to Ferrara.

Unfortunately the coquettish girl praised the beautiful eyes of Giulio d'Este, the Cardinal's younger brother, whereupon this prince of the Church hired assassins who waylaid his brother and tore out his offending eyes.

The Duke banished Ippolito temporarily, but Giulio brooded over the injury and conspired to depose Alphonso and place another brother, Don Ferrante, on the throne. For this act both Ferrante and Giulio were condemned to be imprisoned for life. Ferrante died in confinement but Giulio, after fifty-three years spent in a dungeon of the castle, was finally released.

It might have been expected that the blending of d'Este brutality with the unscrupulous Borgia craft would have given as a result only a more refined cruelty; but if this was the case Cardinal Ippolito II. completely deceived his contemporaries and has left the reputation (through the pen of his panegyrist Mureto) of the utmost affable condescension and magnificent patronage of men of genius. He was himself a dilettante; and it was his ambition to pose as the most cultured and brilliant of the great cardinals of his day. Ippolito I. had been a boon companion of Leo X. in his hunting parties at the Villa La Magliana, but it was not as a "cacciator signorile" or "sporting gentleman" that Ippolito II. wished to eclipse the then illustrious representative of the house of Medici, Cardinal Ferdinando, who was attempting to rival him in his magnificent villa on the Pincian hill.

It does not seem to have occurred to Mureto that both of these men were looking forward to the papacy, and desired to emulate in their own pontificates that of Leo X. Each piece of sculpture acquired for their villas, every literary man attached to their service was a step toward that end. Ippolito II. was as keen a hunter of genius as his uncle had been of deer or boar; and having once bagged his game, as capable of availing himself without scruple of his trophies as Ippolito I. of tearing the antlers from a dying stag.

The princely Cardinal entertained on one occasion a house party of two hundred and fifty guests in his palatial villa, and established here a veritable court. The grandiose frescoes of Zuccari, Tempesta, Muziano, and Vasari still celebrate the glories of his family under the guise of the heroes of mythology garlanded by troops and bevies of cupids, "una copiosa quantita di Amorini." But the gods and demigods banquet all alone on the ceiling of the great hall where they once looked down upon the revels of the Cardinal's convives—noble or distinguished men all of them in their day, although the one name that comes to us of all who shared Ippolito's lavish hospitality and that sheds most glory upon his proud house is that of a poet, by turns patronised as a dependent, ungratefully neglected, and cruelly wronged.

The visitor is shown with pride the room so whimsically decorated with singing birds, where Tasso wrote his Amyntas, and the Fountain of Nature in the lower garden where the pastoral was presented with musical accompaniment before a distinguished audience.

That Leonora d'Este was among those who listened, and indeed had been her uncle's guest and Tasso's good and evil fate during the months which he spent at Villa d'Este, is the only conclusion possible for the thoughtful reader of the poem; and the idyl composed under such circumstances leads inevitably to the tragedy (enacted at that other villa) of Belriguardo, of which Goethe has given us so truthful and so masterly a transcription.

Cardinal Ippolito, as his portraits make him known to us, has none of the sensuality which stamped the face of his grandfather Pope Alexander Borgia, or the heaviness of jaw expressing the stubborness and brutality of the earlier D'Estes; on the contrary, every line of the slight figure is expressive of refinement, the delicate red-stockinged feet are as shapely as a woman's, the expressive, almost transparent hands might be those of an artist as they finger caressingly his collection of intaglios and luxuriate in the smoothness of jades and ivory carvings. His excessive pallor and thinness would give an expression of asceticism, almost of spirituality to the intellectual face were it not in a measure contradicted by the craft in the close-set, slanting eyes, which with the pointed, fulvous beard suggest a possibility of foxy cunning, and inspire in the beholder an uncomfortable, haunting feeling of distrust even when the Cardinal's manner is most condescending and cajoling.

So, robed in filmy lace over rosy velvet, we may see him in imagination tripping daintily down his monumental staircase, his train islanding his figure as in some ensanguined pool and slipping after him adown the steps like the drip of some trail of blood which strangely leaves no stain upon the white marble.

But his face is wreathed with smiles, for he genuinely loves his two beautiful nieces, Lucrezia, Duchess of Urbino, and the gentle Leonora, who are his guests, and he loves his villa, whose beauties he is pointing out to them.

"You do not see the garden at its best," he cavils. "Wait till the roses garland the balustrades. It is too early yet to enjoy Tivoli; the frost may have left the ground but it lingers still in the pavements of this great palace. The halls are damp as vaults; we would have done well, my nieces, to have remained another month in Rome. Not till the middle of May will society desert the city for its villeggiatura. What do you say, Leonora, shall we confess that we have made a mistake and return?"

"Dear uncle, as you say, it is only the palace which, in spite of its braziers, retains the winter chill. Here in the garden the air is balmy, and the Judas trees are all a crimson mist. See how the green is creeping, like an inundation through the russets of last year's grasses. In another fortnight all this magical change will have been wrought, and those who come later will have missed the fairy spectacle."

"Spectacle! ah! that reminds me," replied the Cardinal; "while Nature is shifting the scenes we must prepare the scenario. Confess that I have provided a worthy theatre, one which should suggest to a poet a worthy theme. There, alas! is my great lack—I have no poet. How wastefully on those who need them not are the most precious gifts bestowed! My uncle and godfather, Cardinal Ippolito—the saints rest his soul!—was a dull-brained barbarian and yet he had attached to his service that pearl of poets Ariosto, whom he had neither the intelligence to appreciate nor the justice to reward. What think you was Ariosto's meed for dedicating to his patron the Orlando Furioso? He was made governor of that nest of bandits, the mountain district of Garfagnana, and it in open insurrection against the Duke of Ferrara. A pretty post for a scholar and a poet! But to it he went, and conquered the brigands, proving himself as expert in the use of the sword as in that of the pen.

"We produce no such men now. Bernardo Tasso, to whom I gave employment when he was exiled from Naples, and who wandered freely in this garden, felt not its charm, for he was but a third-rate poet, and even he is dead. Who in our day can interpret the poetry which I feel here but cannot express? And with but so little more of endowment I might have done it, for after all is not the inner ear, the second sight, the major part of genius?

"Listen, and tell me what you hear. Only the musical plash of the fountains and the sonorous undertone of the organ, like the distant roar of surf upon the beach? Ah, me! ah, me! how materialistic you are, my children. Your old uncle hears in these myriad-voiced fountains the musical instruments which Boccaccio gave to the Satyrs; 'cymbals, pipes, and whistling reeds,' and the song of the nymphs. Did you note that startled cry? It is the Oread Arethusa flying from the river-god Alpheus. He is imprisoned in the organ, where he is mightily bellowing, and whence he will presently burst forth. But Arethusa will slip away (coquette that she is), under ground and under sea to her Sicilian home; for fable and stream sing eternally the same story, Mulier hominis confusio est.

"Tell me, my niece, have we in all Italy a poet who can voice such a theme?"

"Yes, uncle," the Duchess of Urbino interposed, "Bernardo Tasso's little son heard and understood the song of the fountains when he played here in his childhood. He told me that he believed a folletto or tricksy spirit talked with him here and promised him that if he came again he would find here both love and fame. He can interpret your songs for you, for he has grown a man, and is a greater poet than his father."

"And meantime," added Leonora, "he has absorbed all that the universities of Bologna and Padua can give him, and has written a romantic poem, the Rinaldo, on the exploits of one of our ancestors, that mythical old peer of Charlemagne, which he has dedicated to our house. It is in recognition of this tribute that our brother Luigi has made him his secretary."

"And Luigi is at the French Court intriguing with the Queen Mother, Catherine de' Medici. Torquato is doubtless with him," replied the Cardinal. "I ask you of what good to tantalise me with impossible suggestions? He had the eyes of a poet, that lad, and he might have served my turn."

"He may still serve you, Uncle Ippolito, for he has quarrelled with Luigi, and is in Rome."

"And wherefore in Rome? To curry favour with Cardinal de' Medici?"

"Possibly, for Tasso is writing a great epic on the taking of Jerusalem by Godfrey of Bouillon and his crusaders."

"'Tis no epic that I wish, but a pastoral—a mere trifle. Yet not so fast. A poem such as you describe, if it were indeed a work of genius, might rouse Christendom to another crusade, a life-work worthy of the next Pope. Lucrezia, the boy must not submit his poem to Cardinal de' Medici. Can you summon him to me, and will he come instantly?"

"If Leonora calls him," the Duchess replied, "he will come."

Cardinal Ippolito lifted his eyebrows almost imperceptibly and darted a keen, sidelong glance at Leonora. She had not heard her sister's last remark, the name of Torquato Tasso had obliterated the present and she was gazing dreamily at the rainbow-tinted dome of St. Peter's.

"Leonora," the Cardinal said softly, "have you heard what Lucrezia was saying, that this young poet has written an epic? If I could see it I might be able to help him in his career, perhaps give him fame."

"O Uncle, will you? How good you are! I will write him at once."

"My dear, I am not good, or disinterested. I am a selfish, an ambitious old man. This festival, given ostensibly for the entertainment of my friends and to introduce my charming nieces, is a part of my deep, ulterior motives. Come, I will confess the machinations of my wicked old heart. Why not, since my ambitions are for you as well as for myself? Nay, Leonora, never flush and tremble, I have no wish to buy my own advancement by selling you to some degenerate prince. Matchmaking is not my kind of diplomacy. I have seen enough in our own family of magnificence won through the martyrdom of women. Your mother, Renée of France, though a king's daughter, brought with her a dowry of unhappiness. My own mother, innocent though she was, bequeathed to us the shameful legacy of the Borgias' deeds and instincts. You may be happy, Lucrezia, with your Duke of Urbino. I ask no confidences, but I am glad that I am not responsible for your marriage.

"You, at least, Leonora, shall live your own life wedded or unwedded as you like. I shall be so great that I can ennoble whom I will, and you, beloved child, shall be the power behind the throne to advise me on whom to shower my benefits."

Lucrezia clapped her hands softly. "Bravo, dear Uncle, I have guessed this ambition, have I not? Cardinal de' Medici is already spoken of as the Pope's successor. But the Medici balls have been carved too often over St. Peter's chair, and you are minded to blazon in their place the d'Este eagle. You need not answer for I know that I am right."

The Cardinal smiled mysteriously. "Too shrewd, my niece, too shrewd by half. How your woman's intuition leaps over intervening obstacles. Never a whisper of this guess at my aims. Remember, it is but your own surmise and that I have never breathed such an aspiration. The immediate object of my solicitude is to secure a charming play worthy of the setting of Villa d'Este breathing the spirit of Ovid and Anacreon, one which will make the old Greek gods live again in these delicious haunts and will redound to the reputation of your uncle's taste in literature."

"How magnanimous you are," cried Leonora, "to disclaim your principal motive, that of helping Tasso! He shall come, and he will give you the most beautiful idyl that was ever written."

And who shall say that Tasso did not make good the promise of his patroness? In the Amyntas we have the development of a theme which is the inevitable product of such a temperament in such a situation, and to the poem itself we will now look for a record of what transpired at Villa d'Este during the writing and the presentation of the pastoral.

To us it is true that the archaic quality, the pseudo-classicism of this pastoral seems at first artificial. "It has only so much of rustic nature as suits a graceful urban fancy." Arcadia is a no man's land, so far from our desires that we cannot picture it even in imagination; but to one who knows how sincere was the enthusiasm of the Renaissance for Greek ideals as well as for modes of expression, how classicism had come to be understood as a synonym for perfection in form whether in literature or the plastic arts,—all the pretty imagery of the Golden Age and its demigods becomes as natural a poetic rendering of sincere feeling as the equally formal restrictions of the measure of the sonnet or the rules which govern the composition of a concerto. Having once learned its technique genius and passion were unconscious of their limitations, but flowed with as true and spontaneous an impulse within these formal bounds as waters in their marble fountains and conduits.

But the living quality in the Amyntas which makes it a thousand-fold more real to us than the Elizabethan masques is not its perfectness of form but the stamp which it bears of being the expression of personal experience and longing but thinly veiled in poetic imagery. Reading the poem at Villa d'Este we read between the lines and recognise the scena of the pastoral and the love which inspired its plot.

In spite of the changes wrought by time we discover the origin of each descriptive passage. This rocky reservoir whose shadowy surface seems to mirror reflections of mysterious faces is surely—

"Dian's pool
Where the great plane's cool shade to cooler waves
Invites the huntress nymphs."

Its encircling laurel thickets might mask to-day strange woodland deities like the Satyr of the play who while Sylvia bathed

"Crouched lynx-eyed among the thick-set shrubs."

The description of the tumultuous pursuit of this Satyr calls up so vividly the Polyphemus in the Triumph of Galatea that we are convinced that Tasso must have been influenced by Raphael's great painting in the Farnesina.

"Not all am I
A despicable thing,..."

He makes the Satyr say;

"This ruddy russet front, these shoulders huge,
These nervy bull-thewed arms, this silky breast,
And these my velvet thighs are manhood's mould robust.
Ill favoured I? Not so!"

As one listens to the delirious nightingales in the dim, green-arched allées, one forgets the trysting trees in other Italian gardens and is sure that only here could Daphne have drawn her argument for love from their caresses.

"Daphne:

The gentle, jocund spring,
Smiling and wantoning,
Makes all things amorous.
Thou only thus,
Untamed wild creature, wilder than the rest,
Deniest love the harbourage of thy breast.
List to yon nightingale
Singing within the vale
'I love, love, love.'
With what renewed embracement vine clasps vine,
Fir blends its boughs with fir, and pine with pine.
Beneath the rugged bark
May'st thou mute inward sighings mark,
And wilt thou graceless be
Less than a vine or tree—
To keep thyself unloving, loverless?
Bend, bend thy stubborn heart
Fool that thou art."

But the physical peculiarity which actually identifies Villa d'Este as the locale of the poem is its cliff, the "sheer crag" from whence Amyntas leaps in his despair.

"Now did he lead me where the cloven steep
Among the rocks and solitary crags
Looms pathless and breaks sheer above a vale.
There paused we, and I, peering far below,
Shuddered, drew from the brink.
. . . . . . . . .
'Sylvia, I come, I follow!' So he cried:
Then headlong leaped,—and left me turned to stone."

There are other poems of Tasso's which refer to his residence at Villa d'Este, and infer Leonora's presence at that time. We may cite in particular the canzone to Leonora at her uncle's villa, beginning "Al nobil colle ove in antichi marmi":

"To the romantic hills where free
To thine enchanted eyes
Works of Greek art in statuary
Of antique marbles rise,
My thought, fair Leonora, roves,
And with it to their gloomy groves
Fast bears me as it flies.
For far from thee, in crowds unblest,
My fluttering heart but ill can rest.

"There to the rock, cascade, and grove,
On mosses dropt with dew,
Like one who thinks and sighs of love
The livelong summer through,
Oft would I dictate glorious things
Of heroes to the Tuscan strings
On my sweet lyre anew,
And to the brooks and trees around
Ippolito's high name resound."

This poem would seem to imply that a part of the Jerusalem was written here, possibly the episode of Sophronia and Olindo, so dear to Tasso himself that though it was not an integral part of the epic he dared the Inquisition rather than comply with the demands of the censor that it should be stricken out. The description of Sophronia is admitted to have been intended to denote Leonora:

"Amongst them in the city lived a maid
The flower of virgins in her perfect prime,
Supremely beautiful! but that she made
Never her care, or beauty only weighed
In worth with virtue; and her worth acquired
A deeper charm from blooming in the shade,
Lovers she shunned, nor loved to be admired,
But from their praises turned to live a life retired."

Equally applicable to Tasso is that of Olindo, the lover who—

"Feared much, hoped little, and in nought presumed.
He could not or he durst not speak, but doomed
To voiceless thought his passion."

But during those "livelong summer days" the poet's passion was not utterly voiceless. The Amyntas is throughout a continual and unequivocal expression, and he daringly in the very prelude makes the god of love, who explains the scheme of the play, declare—

"For wheresoe'er I am, there I am Love,
No less in shepherds' than in heroes' hearts,
The unequal lot grows equal at my will,
My chiefest vaunt, my miracle is this."

Openly and repeatedly Tasso asserts that while he is not indifferent to literary distinction it is not the chief end which he has in view in writing the Amyntas.

"Deem not" (he says) "that all Love's bliss
At last is but a breath
Of fame that followeth.

Love's meed is love, it wooeth, winneth this.
Nathless the lover steadfast to his end
Hath laud ofttimes and maketh Fame his friend."

Goethe makes Tasso confide this double aim to Leonora and her reply shows that he did indeed win the meed he sought. "For what" the poet asks her "is more deserving to survive and silently to last for centuries than the confession of a noble love, confided modestly to gentle song?"

We follow step by step that wooing, finding it in the exquisite apostrophe to the golden age—which concludes:

"Then let us live as erst kind Nature's thralls
And let us love—since hearts
No truce of time may know, and youth departs:
Ay! let us love: suns sink but sink to soar—
On us, our brief day o'er,
Night falls and sleep descends for evermore."

Here again Goethe discovers the personal note, transcribing the poem unscrupulously from its setting in the Amyntas and making Leonora reply with didactic coldness to Tasso's appeal—

"Tasso:
The golden age, ah! whither is it flown,
For which in secret every heart repines?
When every bird winging the limpid air
And every living thing o'er hill and dale
Proclaimed to man, What pleases is allowed.
"Princess:
My friend, the golden age hath passed away.
Shall I confess to thee my secret thoughts?
The golden age, wherewith the bard is wont
Our spirits to beguile, that lovely prime,
Existed in the past no more than now;
Still meet congenial spirits and enhance
Each other's pleasures in this beauteous world;
But in the motto change one single word
And say my friend,—What's fitting is allowed."

Perhaps Leonora did speak thus in the open discussion which followed the reading of the poem as in that at the Court of Urbino when Cardinal Bembo, distraught by his own rhapsody on love, stood silent as one transported, and the lady Emilia to recall him to himself shook him playfully, crying, "Have a care, Pietro, lest in this mood your soul should be separated from your body."

And the gay Cardinal replied: "Madam, this would not be the first miracle which Love hath wrought in me."

Certainly, Tasso's wooing, even at Villa d'Este, was not always a happy one. In the following stanzas he tells of temporary despairs, but he hints also of a great hope at his darkest moment:

"By what dim ways at last Love leadeth man
Unto his joy and sets him 'mid the bliss
Of his heart's heaven of love—then when he most
Thinketh him sunk in an abyss of bale;
O blest Amyntas—from thy fate
I augur for mine own, that so may she,
That fair untender maid, who in a smile
Of pity sheaths the steel of heartlessness,
So may she with true pity heal the hurt
Wherewith feigned pity pierced me to the heart."

In another beautiful passage it is not hope which he sings but rapture:

"Let him who serveth Love
Divine it in his heart, though scarce may he
Divine or give it voice."

What was the boon which gave Tasso so much bliss? Perchance no greater than the one he celebrates in the exquisite lines:

Stava Madonna ad un balcon soletta.
"My lady at a balcony alone
One day was standing, when I chanced to stretch
My arm on hers; pardon I begged, if so
I had offended her; she sweetly answered,
'Not by the placing of thy arm hast thou
Displeased me aught, but by withdrawing it
Do I remain offended!' O fond words!
Dear little love words, short but sweet, and courteous!
Courteous as sweet, affectionate as courteous!
If it were true and certain what I heard,
I shall be always seeking not to offend thee,
Repeating the great bliss: but my sweet life,
By all my eagerness therein remember—
Where there is no offence, there must be
No visiting of vengeance!"

It must have been early in their acquaintance that such gratitude was poured forth for so slight a favour. There are balconies at Villa d'Este, balustraded terraces where now the contorted stems of giant vines wrestle with the carved pillarets and rend them relentlessly from their copings where at intervals the bayonet-leaved aloes keep sentinel like the bravi of Cardinal Ippolito I., their long green knives unsheathed and ready for any deed of horror. Here, unconscious of spying eyes, Leonora may have leant apparently absorbed in that glorious view, and Tasso's hand have stolen furtively to her own.

But was there no other guerdon for his long service than this shy avowal—no other bliss before that long horror of imprisonment and real or imputed madness which ended only after Leonora's death? Only the Duke Alphonso and those who so basely read the poet's private papers can reply.

Cardinal Ippolito must have guessed to what end the pastoral of Villa d'Este was tending; but whether his sympathy was real or feigned for his own uses we cannot know.

He never attained his ambition, for death suddenly claimed him before the aged Pope whom he had hoped to succeed. Tasso's tragedy culminated, as Goethe tells us, at another villa, that of Belriguardo. The pastoral of Villa d'Este ends in a chorus or envoy expressive of that tremulous hope which flutters so deliciously in every line of the exquisite poem:

"I know not if the bitterness
That, serving long, long yearning, one hath borne
In tears and all forlorn,
May wholly turn to sweet, and Love requite
All sorrows with delight.
But if this be and pain
That bringeth joy enricheth often gain;
I ask thee not, O Love,
To give me gain thy common gains above.
. . . . . . . .
If gentle dear disdains
And dulcet coy defeats
And strifes fond lovers use
To fire their hearts—but close with love's long truce."