Abbot. I must speak with him. "T is impossible; He is most private, and must not be thus Intruded on. Abbot. Upon myself I take The forfeit of my fault, if fault there be But I must see him. Her. This eve already. Thou hast seen him once Herman! I command thee, Knock, and apprise the Count of my approach. Her. We dare not. Of my own purpose. The owl's long cry, and, interruptedly, Within a bowshot-Where the Cæsars dwelt, While Cæsar's chambers, and the Augustan halls, And thou didst shine, thou rolling moon, upon Then it seems I must be herald Which soften'd down the hoar austerity Reverend father, stop The stars are forth, the moon above the tops Than that of man; and in her starry shade I learn'd the language of another world. I do remember me, that in my youth, difficult to die. Alone-we know not how-unshrived-untended-With strange accompaniments and fearful signsI shudder at the sight-but must not leave him. Manfred (speaking faintly and slowly.) Old man! 't is not so [MANFRED having said this, expires. Herman. His eyes are fix'd and lifeless. He is gone. Manuel. Close them-My old hand quivers. He departsWhither? I dread to think -but he is gone.-E. (1)"The opening of this scene is, perhaps, the finest passage in the drama; and its solemn, calm, and majestic character throws an air of grandeur over the catastrophe, which was in danger of appearing extravagant, and somewhat too much in the style of Joe Devil and Dr. Faustus." Wilson. As 't were anew, the gaps of centuries; 'T was such a night! 'Tis strange that I recall it at this time; But, I have found, our thoughts take wildest flight (2) "Drove at midnight to see the Coliseum by moonlight: but what can I say of the Coliseum? it must be seen; to describe it I should have thought impossible, if I had not read Manfred. To see it aright, as the Poet of the North tells us of the fair Melrose, one must see it by the pale moonlight.' The stillness of night, the whispering echoes, the moonlight shadows, and the awfu] grandeur of the impending ruins, form a scene of romantic sublimity, such as Byron alone could describe as it deserves. His description is the very thing itself." Matthews's Diary of an Invalid. Look there, I say, Man. Thou false fiend, thou liest! Man. Thou hast no cause he shall not harm And thy surrounding angels; my past power Why-ay-what doth he here? Man. Pronounce-what is thy mission? Come! Abbot. What art thou, unknown being? answer! -speak! Was purchased by no compact with thy crew, And length of watching-strength of mind--and In knowledge of our fathers-when the earth Have made thee Man. But thy many crimes What are they to such as thee? Must crimes be punish'd but by other crimes, Spirit. The genius of this mortal.-Come! 't is Requital for its good or evil thoughts time. Man. I am prepared for all things, but deny Is its own origin of ill and end And its own place and time-its innate sense, tempt me; I have not been thy dupe, nor am thy prey,— [The Demons disappear. Abbot. Alas! how pale thou art-thy lips are white And thy breast heaves-and in thy gasping throat Man. 'T is over-my dull eyes can fix thee not; But yet one prayer-Alas! how fares it with thee ? On (1) In the first edition, this line was accidentally left out. discovering the omission, Lord Byron wrote to Mr. Murray, "You have destroyed the whole effect and moral of the poem, by omitting the last line of Manfred's speaking."-E. (2) In June, 1820, Lord Byron thus writes to his publisher: "Enclosed is something which will interest you; to wit, the opinion of the greatest man in Germany-perhaps in Europe-upon one of the great men of your advertisements (all famous hands,' as Jacob Tonson used to say of his ragamuffins)-in short, a critique of Goethe's upon Manfred. There is the original, an English translation, and an Italian one: keep them all in your archives; for the opinions of such a man as Goethe, whether favourable or not, are always interesting-and this is more so, as favourable. His Faust I never read, for I don't know German; but Matthew Monk Lewis, in 1816, at Coligny, translated most of it to me viva voce, and I was naturally much struck with it: but it was the Steinbach and the Jungfrau, and something else, much more than Faustus, that made me write Manfred. The first scene, however, and that of Faustus are very similar." turning his sad contemplations inwards, he applies to himself the fatal history of the king of Sparta. It is as follows:-Pausanias, a Lacedæmonian general, acquires glory by the important victory at Platea, but afterwards forfeits the confidence of his countrymen through his arrogance, obstinacy, and secret intrigues with the enemies of his country. This man draws upon himself the heavy guilt of innocent blood, which attends him to his end; for, white commanding the fleet of the allied Greeks, in the Black Sea, he is inflamed with a violent passion for a Byzantine maiden. After long resistance, he at length obtains her from her parents, and she is to be delivered up to him at night. She modestly desires the servant to put out the lamp, and, while groping her way in the dark, she overturns it. Pausanias is awakened from his sleep-apprehensive of an attack from murderers, he seizes his sword, and destroys his mistress. The horrid sight never leaves him. Her shade pursues him unceasingly, and he implores for aid in vain from the gods and the exorcising priests. "That poet must have a lacerated reart who selects such a scene from antiquity, appropriates it to himself. and burdens his tragic image with it. The following soliloquy, which is overladen with gloom and a weariness of life, is, by this remark, rendered intelligible. We recommend it as an exercise to all friends of "Byron's tragedy, Manfred, was to me a wonderful pheno- declamation. Hamlet's soliloquy appears improved upon here." menon, and one that closely touched me. This singularly intel-Goethe here subjoins Manfred's soliloquy, beginning "We are lectual poet has taken my Faustus to himself, and extracted from it the strongest nourishment for his hypochondriac humour. He has made use of the impelling principles in his own way, for his own purposes, so that no one of them remains the same; and it is particularly on this account that I cannot enough admire his genius. The whole is in this way so completely formed anew, that it would be an interesting task for the critic to point out, not only the alterations he has made, but their degree of resemblance with, or dissimilarity to, the original: in the course of which, I cannot deny, that the gloomy heat of an unbounded and exuberant despair becomes at last oppressive to us. Yet is the dissatisfaction we feel always connected with esteem and admiration. The following is the extract from Goethe's Kunst und Altherthum (i. e. Art and Antiquity) which the above letter enclosed: "We find thus, in this tragedy, the quintessence of the most astonishing talent, born to be its own tormentor. The character of Lord Byron's life and poetry hardly permits a just and equitable appreciation. He has often enough confessed what it is that torments him. He has repeatedly portrayed it; and scarcely any one feels compassion for this intolerable suffering, over which he is ever laboriously ruminating. There are, properly speak ing, two females whose phantoms for ever haunt him, and which, in this piece also, perform principal parts-one under the name of Astarte, the other without form or actual presence, and merely a voice. Of the horrid occurrence which took place with the former, the following is related :-When a bold and enterprising young man, he won the affections of a Florentine lady. Her busband discovered the amour, and murdered his wife; but the murderer was the same night found dead in the street, and there was no one on whom any suspicion could be attached. Lord | Byron removed from Florence, and these spirits haunted him all bis life after. "This romantic incident is rendered highly probable by innumerable allusions to it in his poems. As, for instance, when, "The grave confidence with which the venerable critic traces the fancies of his brother poet to real persons and events, making no difficulty even of a double murder at Florence to furnish grounds for his theory, affords an amusing instance of the disposition so prevalent throughout Europe, to picture Byron as a man of marvels and mysteries, as well in his life as his poetry. To these exaggerated or wholly false notions of him, the numerous fictions palmed upon the world of his romantic tours and wonderful adventures, in places he never saw, and with persons that never existed, have, no doubt, considerably contributed; and the consequence is, so utterly out of truth and nature are the representaLous of his life and character long current upon the Continent, the fools of time and terror," in which the allusion to Pausanias occurs. From this German criticism we pass to that of the Edinburgh Review on Manfred:-"It is suggested, in an ingenious paper in a late number of the Edinburgh Magazine, that the general conception of this piece, and much of what is excellent in the manner of its execution, have been borrowed from The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, of Marlow; and a variety of passages are quoted, which the author considers as similar, and, in many respects, superior to others in the poem before us. We cannot agree in the general terms of the conclusion; but there is no doubt a certain resemblance, both in some of the topics that are suggested, and in the cast of the diction in which they are expressed. Thus, to induce Faustus to persist in his unlawful studies, he is told that the Spirits of the Elements will serve him,Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids, Shadowing more beauty in their ayrie browes, Than have the white breasts of the Queene of Love.' Was this the face that launcht a thousand ships, The catastrophe, too, is bewailed in verses of great elegance and that it may be questioned whether the real flesh and blood' hero of these pages,-the social, practical-minded, and, with all his faults and eccentricities, English Lord Byron,-may not, to the over-exalted imaginations of most of his foreign admirers, appear butan ordinary, unromantic, and prosaic personage."-Moose. I On reading this, Lord Byron wrote from Venice:-" Jeffrey is very kind about Manfred, and defends its originality, which I did not know that any body had attacked. As to the germs of it, they may be found in the Journal which I sent to Mrs. Leigh, shortly before I left Switzerland. I have the whole scene of Manfred before me, as if it was but yesterday, and could point it out, spot by spot, torrent and all.”—E. 338 The Lament of Tasso ADVERTISEMENT. Parisina and Hugo were beheaded, according to the annal of Gibbon. (1) THE LAMENT OF TASSO. I. AT Ferrara, in the Library, are preserved the original MSS. of Tasso's Gerusalemme and of Guarini's Pastor Fido, with letters of Tasso, one from Titian to Ariosto, and the inkstand and chair, the tomb and the house of the latter. But, as misfortune has a greater interest for posterity, and little or none for the cotemporary, the cell where Tasso was confined in the hospital of St. Anna attracts a more fixed at- LONG years!-It tries the thrilling frame to bear, tention than the residence or the monument of | And eagle-spirit of a Child of SongThere Long years of outrage, calumny, and wrong; Ariosto at least it had this effect on me. are two inscriptions, one on the outer gate, the Imputed madness, prison'd solitude, (2) second over the cell itself, inviting, unnecessarily, And the mind's canker in its savage mood, the wonder and the indignation of the spectator. When the impatient thirst of light and air Ferrara is much decayed, and depopulated: the Parches the heart; and the abhorred grate, castle still exists entire; and I saw the court where Marring the sunbeams with its hideous shade, Cut is the branch that might have growne full straight, But these and many other smooth and fanciful verses in this cu- (1) The original MS. of this poem is dated," The Apennines, April 20, 1817." It was written in consequence of Lord Byron having visited Ferrara, for a single day, on his way to Florence. In a letter from Rome, he says,-"The Lament of Tasso, which I sent from Florence, has, I trust, arrived. I look upon it as a "Of the Prometheus of Eschylus I was passionately fond as a boy (it was one of the Greek plays we read thrice a-year at Harrow); indeed, that and the Medea were the only ones, except the Seven br fore Thebes, which ever much pleased me. The Promethens, if not exactly in my plan, has always been so much in my head, that I can easily conceive its influence over all or any thing that I have written but I deny Marlow and his progeny, and beg that you will do the same."-B. Letters, 1817. 'These be good rhymes!' as Pope's papa said to him when he was a boy." "The Lament possesses much of the tenderness and pathos of the Prisoner of Chillon. Lord Byron has not delivered himself unto any one wild and fearful vision of the imprisoned Tasso,— ¦ he has not dared to allow himself to rush forward with headlong passion into the horrors of his dungeon, and to describe, as he could fearfully have done, the conflict and agony of his uttermost despair,-but he shows us the poet sitting in his cell, and singing there-a low, melancholy, wailing lament, sometimes, indeed, bordering on utter wretchedness, but o tener partaking of a settled grief, occasionally subdued into mournful resignation, cheered by delightful remembrances, and elevated by the confident hope of an immortal fame. His is the gathered grief of many years, over which his soul has brooded, till she has in some measure lost the power of misery; and this soliloquy is one which we can believe he might have uttered to himself any morning, or noon, or night of his solitude, as he seemed to be half communing with his own heart, and half addressing the ear of that human nature from which he was shut out, but of which he felt the continual and abiding presence within his imagination.”— Wilson. (2) Tasso's biographer, the Abate Serassi, has left it without doubt, that the first cause of the poet's punishment was his desire to be occasionally, or altogether, free from his servitude at the court of Alfonso. In 1575, Tasso resolved to visit Rome, and enjoy the indulgence of the jubilee; and this error," says the Abate, "increasing the suspicion already entertained, that he was in search of another service, was the origin of his misforLunes. On his return to Ferrara, the Duke refused to admit him to an audience, and he was repulsed from the houses of all the dependants of the court; and not one of the promises which the Cardinal Albano had obtained for him were carried into effect. || Then it was that Tasso-after having suffered these hardships for some time, seeing himself constantly discountenanced by the Duke and the Princesses, abandoned by his friends, and derided by his enemies-could no longer contain himself within the bounds of moderation, but, giving vent to his choler, publicly broke forth into the most injurious expressions imaginable, both against the Duke and all the house of Este, cursing his past service, and retracting all the praises he had ever given in his verses to those princes, or to any individual connected with them, declaring that they were all a gang of poltroons, ingrates, and Works through the throbbing eyeball to the brain Thou too art ended-what is left me now? With a hot sense of heaviness and pain; Stands scoffing through the never-open'd gate, Till its unsocial bitterness is gone; Which is my lair, and—it may be my grave. (1) How Salem's shrine was won, and how adored. II. But this is o'er—my pleasant task is done;—(2) scoundrels (poltroni, ingrati, e ribaldi). For this offence he was arrested, conducted to the hospital of St. Anna, and confined in a solitary cell as a madman." Serassi, Vita del Tasso.-E. [1] "In the hospital of St. Anna, at Ferrara, they show a cell, over the door of which is the following inscription :-' Rispettate, O posteri, la celebrità di questa stanza, dove Torquato Tasso, infermo più di tristezza che delirio, ditenuto dimorò anni vii. mesi ii., scrise verse e prose, e fù rimesso in libertà ad instanza della cità di Bergamo, nel giorno vi. Luglio, 1586.'-The dungeon is below the ground-floor of the hospital, and the light penetrates through its grated window from a small yard, which seems to have been common to other cells. It is nine paces long, between five and six wide, and about seven feet high. The bedstead, so they lell, has been carried off piecemeal, and the door half cut away by the devotion of those whom 'the verse and prose' of the prisoner have brought to Ferrara. The poet was confined in this room from the middle of March 1579 to December 1580, when he was removed to a contiguous apartment much larger, in which, to use his own expressions, he could philosophise and walk about. The inscription is incorrect as to the immediate cause of his enlargement, which was promised to the city of Bergamo, but was carried into effect at the intercession of Don Vincenzo Gonzago, Prince of Mantua." Hobhouse. (2) "The opening lines bring the poet before us at once, as if the door of the dungeon was thrown open. From this bitter complaint, how nobly the unconquered bard rises into calm, and serene, and dignified exultation over the beauty of that young 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? O Leonora! wilt not thou reply ? (3) I was indeed delirious in my heart To lift my love so lofty as thou art; That thou wert beautiful, and I not blind, But ours is fathomless, and hath no shore. III. Above me, hark! the long and maniac cry creation, his soul's child,' the Gerusalemme Liberala. The exultation of conscious genius then dies away, and we behold him, bound between distraction and disease,' no longer in an inspired mood, but sunk into the lowest prostration of human misery. There is something terrible in this transition from di vine rapture to degraded agony.” Wilson. (3) In a letter to his friend Scipio Gonzaga, shortly after his confinement, Tasso exclaims,—“Ah, wretched me! I had designed to write, besides two epic poems of most noble argument, four tragedies, of which I had formed the plan. I had schemed, too, many works in prose, on subjects the most lofty, and most useful to human life; I had designed to write philosophy with eloquence, in such a manner that there might remain of me an eternal memory in the world. Alas! I had expected to close my life with glory and renown; but now, oppressed by the burden of so many calamities, I have lost every prospect of reputation and of honour The fear of perpetual imprisonment increases my melancholy; the indignities which I suffer augment it; and the squalor of my beard, my hair, and habit, the sordidness and filth, exceedingly annoy me. Sure am I that, if SHE, who so little has corresponded to my attachment-if she saw me in such a state, and in such affliction-she would bave some compassion on me." Opere, t. x. p. 387.-E. (4)" For nearly the first year of his confinement, Tasso endured all the horrors of a solitary cell, and was under the care of a gaoler whose chief virtue, although he was a poet and a man of letters, was a cruel obedience to the commands of his prince. |