"For I was nevermore to meet
That parent face to face,
Clasp'd in her clear embrace,
With folds so strait, so binding and so sweet.
Alas! 't was mine thenceforth to roam
With ill-supporting feet,
And, like Ascanius o'er the trackless floods,
Or young Camilla, cast on wilds and woods,
Follow a wandering father without home."
These lines—breathing forth such grateful recollections of maternal tenderness, watching, weeping, praying, over a most beloved and affectionate child, from whom she was parting for ever, and who was destined to be far greater than even she, in her fondest entrancement, could have hoped—remind us of our own Cowper's filial reminiscences, in "words that weep," translating "tears that speak," on receiving, at a more distant period of a suffering life, his mother's picture: at sight of which, for a while, he lived over again, with a thousand times more intense delight, the scenes of infancy, renewed, like a vision of pre-existence in some happier state than that which had intervened since he had borne the burthen and heat of a long day of life consumed in anguish of spirit, for which, on this side of the grave, he found no solace, and beyond it, no hope for his bewildered mind; dark as Egypt under the ninth plague in that quarter, though, in every other, light as the land of Goshen. Between Tasso and Cowper there were many traits of sad as well as noble resemblance—kindred genius, a kindred malady, and kindred misfortunes; but not kindred alleviations: the advantage here was on our countryman's side; but his disease lay deeper than that of the former, and the symptoms, if not so violent after the first terrible attack, were more inveterate; so that, contemplating the fate of the glorious Italian under eclipse, and pitying him with a sympathy which no man living but himself could feel, Cowper might have drawn the same comparison between Tasso's case and his own, as he has done in those heart-wringing verses (the last which he is recorded to have composed) under the title of "The Castaway." These were founded upon a circumstance mentioned in Anson's Voyage, of a sailor who fell overboard in a storm, when the ship could not be stayed to rescue him, but who followed in its wake, crying after it, and being heard by his companions, while he
——"lived an hour
In ocean, self-upheld;
And ever, as the minutes flew,
Entreated help, or cried 'adieu.'"
* * * *
"At length he drank
The stifling wave, and then he sank."
The melancholy poet adds, in reference to himself, that
"Misery still delights to trace
Its semblance in another's case.
* * * *
No voice divine the storm allay'd,
No light propitious shone,
When snatch'd from all effectual aid,
We perish'd, each alone;
But I beneath a rougher sea,
And 'whelm'd in deeper gulfs than he."
Both of Tasso's parents had early and deeply impressed upon his mind and his affections veneration and love to God. In his tenth year the Jesuit fathers, following up the religious instructions of this child of promise according to their views of the Gospel, admitted him to the sacrament; on which occasion, though he acknowledges, in one of his epistles, that he could not enter into the mystery of "the real presence," according to the Roman interpretation of the true and simple scripture doctrine of "the communion of the body and the blood of Christ," yet, impressed with awe by the pomp of the spectacle, and elevated almost to transport by sympathy of devotion with the surrounding multitude, he received the symbol, according to his own ingenuous account, with "a certain indescribable and unwonted satisfaction." This circumstance deserves particular mention, because, assuredly, by such a course of domestic and school discipline the boy was trained up in what he understood to be genuine piety, and of which, through after life, he became a zealous professor, however lax on some other subjects his writings, and even his actions, may have been. In the latter respect, however, he was countenanced by the licentious manners of the age, and especially of that class of society, refined and exalted as it was, in which his lot was cast, but in which he was rather entertained as a guest than recognised as a member of the privileged order. His father, in one of his letters to his mother, says, "It is of the utmost importance to impress, with all your influence and authority, upon the infantine mind the name, the love, and the fear of God, that the child may learn to love and honour Him from whom he has received, not life only, but all the benefits and mercies of providence and grace, which can render man happy in this world, and blessed in that which is to come." In the same letter he says, "I condemn those who beat their children, not less than if they should dare to lay hands on the image of God."
It was after the expatriated party to whom Bernardo belonged had planned an attack upon Naples, by the combined fleets of France and Turkey, which miscarried in a miserable piratical descent upon the neighbouring coast, and a disgraceful re-embarkment, that Portia and her daughter were received into a convent, and Torquato was sent to his father at Rome; who, an exile, on a bed of sickness, and in deep poverty, was solacing himself, amidst his misfortunes, with preparing a volume of his Rime for the press, and unweariedly labouring to complete his Amadigi. In "the eternal city," young Tasso prosecuted his studies with indefatigable assiduity, and having for companion a cousin of his own name, Christofero Tasso, a lad of indolent habits and slow capacity. He, by his example and influence, for a while happily stimulated the latter to become a worthy competitor of himself; but he soon growing tired in the course, Torquato left him, and every rival beside, far behind in every learned and liberal accomplishment.
In 1556 Portia died, at Naples, never having seen her husband since his original proscription. Her illness was so brief and so violent, that Bernardo doubted whether it was poison or a broken heart that had cut her off in the prime of her years,—most of which, however, had been so melancholy, since her happiness first seemed consummated by her union with the man of her choice, and in the children of their love, that there needed no auxiliary, in this instance, for Nature to do her work in the shape of death. Meanwhile Bernardo, not being permitted to return to Naples, was compelled, by the stress of hard circumstances, to leave his daughter in the hands of those whom he had but too much reason to call her enemies, though the nearest of kin to her deceased mother. These—probably from motives of rapacity, though political rancour may have added its malignity to the cold venom of avarice—instituted a process against young Torquato, to disinherit him, under a pretence which a fiend incarnate (had such a wanderer from the abyss of lost spirits been permitted to darken the earth with his shadow) might have blushed to advance in a court of justice,—that, having followed his miserable parent to Rome, the boy (at ten years of age!) had made himself partaker of his father's imputed treason, and thereby righteously exposed himself to the same penalties of exile and confiscation. The issue of this iniquitous proceeding does not appear, except it may be gathered from the fact, that the uncles contrived to withhold Torquato's portion of his mother's dowry from him till the last year of his life: and, further to secure the control, at least, of the property by themselves, they married her daughter Cornelia, who, at fifteen years, had grown up into a beauty, to a gentleman of Sorrento, of narrow fortune, but honourable birth, in spite of the protestations of her father, whose ambition had destined her for a higher and more wealthy alliance; his hopes and his plans being even a day's march beyond his power of overtaking them by performance. There is extant a letter written on this occasion by Torquato (probably at the dictation of his father) to Signora Vittoria Colonna, in which the lad bitterly complains against the cruelty of his uncles in forcing this match upon his sister; and implores her interference to prevent the entailment of poverty and disgrace upon the young Cornelia, by such a sacrifice of her person and property to the mercenary views of her relatives. "It is hard," says the reputed writer, "to lose one's fortune; but the degradation of blood is much harder to bear. My poor old father has only us two; and, since fortune has robbed him of his property, and of a wife whom he loved as his own soul, suffer not rapacity to deprive him of his beloved daughter, in whose bosom he hoped to finish tranquilly the few last years of his old age. We have no friends at Naples; our relations are our enemies, and, on account of the circumstances of my father's situation, every one fears to take us by the hand." These stern but tender sentiments, wrung in the agony of heart-sickness from the father, were written, not only by the hand of the son upon the paper of the epistle, but on his own heart, and became identified with his personal feelings through life. Though he never suffered the escutcheon of his family to be blemished by a humbling connection, yet he paid dearly, both in his affections and in his pride, to preserve it; and, if the tradition of his love for a princess of the house of Este be founded in truth, he must have felt that he was himself, in that case, playing the part of "some poor gentleman," whose alliance would be a degradation of the most ancient blood of Italy. Both the father and the son, in the sequel, were reconciled—first for Cornelia's sake, and afterwards for his own—to her husband; who proved a worthy and kind consort, with whom she lived happily, though not long, and by whom she had several children.
In a letter addressed by Bernardo to his daughter, while she was yet a girl, occurs the following affecting day-dreams of the comforts of old age which he hoped to realise in her filial attentions. After exhorting her to mind her lessons, and promising in due time to provide a husband worthy of her, with whom she should live near himself, he thus fondly adverts to that closing scene of a troubled life, to which many a sufferer like him, to the last moment, looked on as a forlorn hope—forlorn, yet inexpressibly soothing, and cherished even in the heart of despair:—"Sweet and tranquil to me will be old age, when I shall see (as I hope it may be the will of God) myself perpetuated in your little ones, with my very features impictured on their countenances. Death will then appear to me less terrible, when, beholding you in honour and in peace, enjoying the love of your husband, and the delights derived from the affections of your children, you shall close with pale hands these eyes of mine. And surely it is due to a dear father to receive the last kisses, the last tears, and every other pious and tender office, from a dutiful and loving daughter."
Fresh commotions in Italy rendering Rome an unsafe sojourn for the homeless Bernardo, he removed his son and his nephew to Bergamo, and fled himself to Ravenna, with two shirts and his Amadigi yet uncompleted; as destitute as his contemporary Camoëns, when he escaped from shipwreck with his Lusiad in one hand, and with the other buffeting the waves—thus saving at once his life and his immortality! On as troubled a sea, by land, as any breadth of water between Lisbon and Canton, not excepting that round the Cape of Storms, Bernardo was tossed to and fro throughout Italy; and continued to the last as poor, yet as sanguine, as the only genius that Portugal had hitherto produced, and proved itself unworthy to give birth to another by its neglect, if not its ingratitude and inhumanity, to that one. But here a gleam of sunshine broke upon Bernardo, amidst the darkness of his flight from Rome. The duke of Urbino invited him to Pesaro, and afforded him a welcome but temporary asylum there from the persecution of his enemies, and the pressure of indigence—a retreat, indeed, which he himself acknowledged was such as might give inspiration to any poet, and where lie, himself, in quiet and amidst that comfort to which he had lately been a stranger, might complete his long poem.