| Villa d'Este, at Tivoli—Present Statei | Alinari |
CHAPTER V
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.