INTRODUCTION TO THE LAMENT OF TASSO.

AFTER all that has been written upon the Duke of Ferrara's imprisonment of Tasso, a great deal continues to be left to conjecture. It seems certain that he was in love with the Princess Eleonora, and that he addressed her amatory poems. There are other pieces, which probably refer to her, in which he boasts of a dishonourable success, and which are supposed to have fallen into the hands of her brother, the Duke. But the immediate cause of Tasso's arrest was a quarrel in the palace at Ferrara, when he threw a knife at a domestic. The incident ended in his being sent as a lunatic to the convent of St. Francis. This was on the 11th of July, 1577, and on the 20th he made his escape. In February, 1579, he returned to Ferrara, and the Duke and the Princess refusing to notice him, he uttered imprecations against them, was declared a madman, and was confined for seven years in the hospital of St. Anna. A miserable dungeon below the ground floor, and lighted from a grated window, which looks into a small court, is shown as the scene of his sufferings, but there is no likelihood that it has been correctly chosen, and Tasso was at least removed to a spacious apartment before a twelvemonth had elapsed. The poet protested that the madness of 1577 was feigned to please the Duke, who hoped, according to modern inferences, that any imputations upon the name of the Princess would be ascribed to the hallucinations of a distempered mind. Whether the subsequent madness of 1579 was real or not, has been the subject of endless speculations, but if clouds obscured the mind of Tasso they broke away at intervals, and allowed him to continue his immortal compositions. Lord Byron adopts the theory that he was imprisoned under a false pretence to avenge a pure but presumptuous love. The original MS. o the "Lament of Tasso" is dated "The Apennines, April 20, 1817." It was inspired by a single day's sojourn at Ferrara, when Lord Byron visited it on his way to Florence, and it is a striking instance of his instinctive sense of the direction in which his power lay, that before starting on the journey, he expressed his indifference for the poet's manuscripts, and centred his interest upon "the cell where they caged him." He was well aware that his imagination would be kindled by the

scene of Tasso's woes, and that his own experience of the workings of a tortured bosom would enable him to celebrate in worthy verse the pangs of his brother bard. "I look upon it," he wrote to Murray, "as a 'These be good rhymes!' as Pope's papa said to him when he was a boy." He did not overrate their excellence, for they are among his finest strains. They are mournful but not morbid,—the plaintive musings of a sorrowstricken man, couched in the choicest language of a poet. The mind of Tasso wanders on in a natural progression from his captivity to his poem, from his poem to Leonora, from Leonora back to his dungeon, and his beautifully contrasted thoughts are at once so natural, so original, and so piteous, that though there are pieces of Lord Byron which strike us more upon a first perusal, there is none that wins more lasting admiration. Throughout there is a wonderful vividness of feeling, and the final section, when Tasso, soaring into far futurity, utters the proud prediction of his coming pre-eminence over his persecuting sovereign and disdainful mistress,—is majestic to sublimity. Lord Byron received three hundred guineas for the copyright.

THE LAMENT OF TASSO.

I.

LONG years!-It tries the thrilling frame to bear
And eagle-spirit of a child of Song-

Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong;
Imputed madness, prison'd solitude,

And the mind's canker in its savage mood,
When the inpatient thirst of light and air
Parches the heart; and the abhorr'd grate,
Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade,
Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain,
With a hot sense of heaviness and pain;
And bare, at once, Captivity display'd

Stands scoffing through the never-open'd gate,
Which nothing through its bars admits, save day,
And tasteless food, which I have eat alone
Till its unsocial bitterness is gone;

And I can banquet like a beast of prey,
Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave

Which is my lair, and—it may be my grave.
All this hath somewhat worn me, and may wear,
But must be borne. I stoop not to despair;
For I have battled with mine agony,
And made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow circus of my dungeon wall,
And freed the Holy Sepulchre from thrall;
And revell'd among men and things divine,
And pour'd my spirit over Palestine,
In honour of the sacred war for Him,
The God who was on earth and is in heaven,

For he has strengthen'd me in heart and limb.
That through this sufferance I might be forgiven,
I have employ'd my penance to record

How Salem's shrine was won, and how adored.

II.

But this is o'er-my pleasant task is done :-
My long-sustaining friend of many years!
If I do blot thy final page with tears,

Know, that my sorrows have wrung from me none.
But thou, my young creation! my soul's child!
Which ever playing round me came and smiled,
And woo'd me from myself with thy sweet sight,
Thou too art gone-and so is my delight:
And therefore do I weep and inly bleed
With this last bruise upon a broken reed.
Thou too art ended-what is left me now?
For I have anguish yet to bear—and how?
I know not that-but in the innate force
Of my own spirit shall be found resource.
I have not sunk, for I had no remorse,

Nor cause for such they call'd me mad-and why?
Oh Leonora wilt not thou reply?1

I was indeed delirious in my heart

To lift my love so lofty as thou art;
But still my frenzy was not of the mind;
I knew my fault, and feel my punishment
Not less because I suffer it unbent.

That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind,

Hath been the sin which shuts me from mankind;

But let them go, or torture as they will,

My heart can multiply thine image still
Successful love may sate itself away;

The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate

To have all feeling, save the one, decay,
And every passion into one dilate,

As rapid rivers into ocean pour;

But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore.

III.

Above me, hark! the long and maniac cry
Of minds and bodies in captivity.

And hark! the lash and the increasing howl,
And the half-inarticulate blasphemy!

There be some here with worse than frenzy foul,
Some who do still goad on the o'er-labour'd mind,
And dim the little light that's left behind
With needless torture, as their tyrant will

Is wound up to the lust of doing ill : 2

With these and with their victims am I class'd,

'Mid sounds and sights like these long years have pass'd; 'Mid sights and sounds like these my life may close: So let it be for then I shall repose.

IV.

I have been patient, let me be so yet;

I had forgotten half I would forget,

But it revives-Oh! would it were my lot

To be forgetful as I am forgot!

Feel I not wroth with those who bade me dwell

In this vast lazar-house of many woes?

Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind,

Nor words a language, nor ev'n men mankind;
Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,
And each is tortured in his separate hell-
For we are crowded in our solitudes-
Many, but each divided by the wall,

Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods;
While all can hear, none heed his neighbour's call-
None! save that One, the veriest wretch of all,
Who was not made to be the mate of these,
Nor bound between Distraction and Disease.
Feel I not wroth with those who placed me here?
Who have debased me in the minds of men,
Debarring me the usage of my own,
Blighting my life in best of its career,

Branding my thoughts as things to shun and fear?
Would I not pay them back these pangs again,
And teach them inward Sorrow's stifled groan?
The struggle to be calm, and cold distress,
Which undermines our Stoical success?
No-still too proud to be vindictive--I
Have pardon'd princes' insults, and would die.
Yes, Sister of my Sovereign! for thy sake