Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 24, 2025
The girls were pretty enough girls, I dare say, under ordinary circumstances, one was really lovely, with soft cheeks, long eyelashes, eyes deep and liquid, and Tasso's gold in her hair, though of a bad figure, ill set off by a bad dress, but Venus herself could not have been seen to advantage in such evil plight as they, panting, perspiring, ruffled, frowzy, puff-balls revolving through an atmosphere of dust, a maze of steaming, reeking human couples, inhumanly heated and simmering together with a more than Spartan fortitude.
Her look of astonishment, as she loosed my hand and started away from me, recalled me to a sense of my strange, my criminal indiscretion. "Forgive me," I said, hurriedly, as soon as I could speak again; "I did not know what I was saying." "Ah, Tasso's mad fit has come on, I see," she answered quietly, for she had recovered herself sooner than I had. "Let him go home and keep his head cool.
It was impossible to treat of Tasso without taking, as it were, as text for our thoughts, this homage rendered by the nation to the genius whose love and loyalty were ill merited by the court of Ferrara. The Venetian melody breathes so sharp a melancholy, such hopeless sadness, that it suffices in itself to reveal the secret of Tasso's grief.
I was pointing out the house which belonged to Tasso's father." "Tasso! Hein! and which is the fair Eleonora's?" "Monsieur," answered Isaura, rather startled at that question, from a professed homme de lettres, "Eleonora did not live at Sorrento." "Tant pis pour Sorrente," said the homme de lettres, carelessly. "No one would care for Tasso if it were not for Eleonora."
Tasso's proud spirit could not endure the neglect of his once ardent friend, and he set out again into the cold inhospitable world, imploring in his great poverty from a former patron the loan of ten scudi, to pay the expenses of his journey to Rome.
But it should be remembered, ere we break into invectives against the sordidness of the age which suffered this degradation, that the waywardness of Tasso's temper rendered it hard to satisfy him as an inmate, or to befriend him as a patron. Restored to health, at the grand duke's invitation he went to Florence, where both prince and people received him with every mark of admiration.
Not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitively alive to all impressions of the senses. Spenser was, in some respects, more an Italian than an English poet. It is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing the stanzas of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata.
This is not Tasso's only obligation to the Greek romances, as we have already seen that he was indebted to Heliodorus for the hint of his story of Clorinda.
He could not have incarnated in plastic form Shakespeare's Juliet and Imogen, Dante's Francesca da Rimini, Tasso's Erminia and Clorinda; but he might have supplied a superb illustration to the opening lines of the Lucretian epic, where Mars lies in the bed of Venus, and the goddess spreads her ample limbs above her Roman lover.
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.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking