[Footnote 6:
"Giace l'alta Cartago: appena i segni
De l'alte sue ruine il lido serba.
Muoiono le città: muoiono i regni:
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba:
E l'uom d'esser mortal par che si sdegni.
Oh nostra mente cupida e superba!"
Canto xv. st. 20.
Great Carthage is laid low. Scarcely can eye
Trace where she stood with all her mighty crowd
For cities die; kingdoms and nations die;
A little sand and grass is all their shroud;
Yet mortal man disdains mortality!
O mind of ours, inordinate and proud!
Very fine is this stanza of Tasso; and yet, like some of the finest writing of Gray, it is scarcely more than a cento. The commentators call it a "beautiful imitation" of a passage in Sannazzaro; and it is; but the passage in Sannazzaro is also beautiful. It contains not only the "Giace Cartago," and the "appena i segni," &c., but the contrast of the pride with the mortality of man, and, above all, the "dying" of the cities, which is the finest thing in the stanza of its imitator.
"Qua devictae Carthaginis arces
Procubuere, jacentque infausto in littore turres
Eversae; quantum ille metus, quantum illa laborum
Urbs dedit insultans Latio et Laurentibus arvis!
Nunc passim vix reliquias, vix nomina servans,
Obruitur propriis non agnoscenda ruinis.
Et querimur genus infelix, humana labare
Membra aevo, cum regna palam moriantur et urbes."
De Partu Virginis, lib. ii.
The commentators trace the conclusion of this passage to Dante, where he says that it is no wonder families perish, when cities themselves "have their terminations" (termin hanuo): but though there is a like germ of thought in Dante, the mournful flower of it, the word "death," is not there. It was evidently suggested by a passage (also pointed out by the commentators) in the consolatory letter of Sulpicius to Cicero, on the death of his daughter Tullia;—"Heu nos homunculi indignamur, si quis nostrum interiit, aut occisus est, quorum vita brevior esse debet, cum uno loco tot oppidorum cadavera projecta jaceant." (Alas! we poor human creatures are indignant if any one of us dies or is slain, frail as are the materials of which we are constituted; and yet we can see, lying together in one place, the dead bodies of I know not how many cities!) The music of Tasso's line was indebted to one in Petrarch's _Trionfo del Tempo, v. 112
_" Passan le signorie, passano i regni;"