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Updated: June 22, 2025
"Formerly, during the period term'd classic," says Sainte-Beuve, "when literature was govern'd by recognized rules, he was considered the best poet who had composed the most perfect work, the most beautiful poem, the most intelligible, the most agreeable to read, the most complete in every respect, the Aeneid, the Gerusalemme, a fine tragedy. To-day, something else is wanted.
His teeth were chattering with cold and fear; but as he began to realise his extreme peril, terror lent wings to his heels, and he almost outstripped the nimble Temistoele in the race for safety. They reached at last the ruined part of the city near the Porta Maggiore, and in the shadow of the deep archway where the road branches to the right towards Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Temistocle halted.
In comparison with the Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata and Os Lusiadas lack intellectual control and spiritual depth; but in comparison with the Roman, the two modern poems thrill with a new passion of life, a new wine of life, heady, as it seems, with new significance a significance as yet only felt, not understood.
At eight o'clock in the evening he was opposite Saint Peter's; at midnight he was standing alone at the desolate cross- roads before Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, beyond the Lateran, and only just within the walls. From place to place he wandered, feeling no fatigue, but only a burning fever in his head and an icy chill in his heart.
His eyes ranged also over all the basilicas, Santa Maria Maggiore, San Giovanni in Laterano, the cradle of the papacy, San Paolo-fuori-le-Mura, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, Sant' Agnese, and the others; they beheld, too, the domes of the Gesu of Sant' Andrea della Valle, San Carlo and San Giovanni dei Fiorentini, and indeed all those four hundred churches of Rome which make the city like a campo santo studded with crosses.
One moonlit evening she heard an old gondoliere challenge a younger one to alternate with him the stanzas of the Gerusalemme. The men stood on the Piazzetta beside the Laguna, surrounded by other gondolieri in the moonlight.
It has the essential character of an epic, short of rhythm and versification. Its "argument" and its "books"; its contrasts and "episodes"; its grouping of characters and dénoûment are as carefully elaborated as the Gerusalemme of Tasso, or the Aeneid of Virgil. And it produces on the mind the effect of a poem with an epic or dramatic plot.
Gregory of Nazianzum; the folio Hebrew Bible, which was the only thing that Duke Frederico of Urbino reserved for himself of the spoil at the capture of Volterra in 1472, and for which the Jews in Venice offered its weight in gold; a sketch of the first three cantos of the Gerusalemme Liberata in the handwriting of Tasso; a copy of Dante in the handwriting of Boccaccio; and several of Petrarch's autograph sonnets.
But how many of the churches were empty, among them some of the most ancient and venerable, San Clemente, Sant' Agnese, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where during the offices one saw but a few believers of the neighbourhood.
In his old age, for instance, he taught himself Italian, and his visitors would find him, with Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata in front of him, looking out in a dictionary every word that presented any difficulty to him, and of such there were many.
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