"Then let us live as erst kind Nature's thralls
And let us love—since hearts
No truce of time may know, and youth departs:
Ay! let us love: suns sink but sink to soar—
On us, our brief day o'er,
Night falls and sleep descends for evermore."
Here again Goethe discovers the personal note, transcribing the poem unscrupulously from its setting in the Amyntas and making Leonora reply with didactic coldness to Tasso's appeal—
"Tasso:
The golden age, ah! whither is it flown,
For which in secret every heart repines?
When every bird winging the limpid air
And every living thing o'er hill and dale
Proclaimed to man, What pleases is allowed.
"Princess:
My friend, the golden age hath passed away.
Shall I confess to thee my secret thoughts?
The golden age, wherewith the bard is wont
Our spirits to beguile, that lovely prime,
Existed in the past no more than now;
Still meet congenial spirits and enhance
Each other's pleasures in this beauteous world;
But in the motto change one single word
And say my friend,—What's fitting is allowed."
Perhaps Leonora did speak thus in the open discussion which followed the reading of the poem as in that at the Court of Urbino when Cardinal Bembo, distraught by his own rhapsody on love, stood silent as one transported, and the lady Emilia to recall him to himself shook him playfully, crying, "Have a care, Pietro, lest in this mood your soul should be separated from your body."
And the gay Cardinal replied: "Madam, this would not be the first miracle which Love hath wrought in me."
Certainly, Tasso's wooing, even at Villa d'Este, was not always a happy one. In the following stanzas he tells of temporary despairs, but he hints also of a great hope at his darkest moment:
"By what dim ways at last Love leadeth man
Unto his joy and sets him 'mid the bliss
Of his heart's heaven of love—then when he most
Thinketh him sunk in an abyss of bale;
O blest Amyntas—from thy fate
I augur for mine own, that so may she,
That fair untender maid, who in a smile
Of pity sheaths the steel of heartlessness,
So may she with true pity heal the hurt
Wherewith feigned pity pierced me to the heart."
In another beautiful passage it is not hope which he sings but rapture:
"Let him who serveth Love
Divine it in his heart, though scarce may he
Divine or give it voice."
What was the boon which gave Tasso so much bliss? Perchance no greater than the one he celebrates in the exquisite lines: