To a friend, he wrote—“I am come to begin my conversation in Heaven in this elevated place.” The Pope sent him absolution under his own hand and seal. “I shall be crowned!” said the dying poet. “Not with laurel, as a poet in the Capitol, but with a better crown of glory in Heaven.”
The monk who watched and prayed with him on the night ending with the dawn of April 25, 1595, caught his last murmur:—
“In manus tuas, Domine!”
He had instructed his friend, Cardinal Aldobrandini, to collect and destroy all his printed works, the mutilation of which had nettled him to frenzy, a few years before. They were nothing to him now; the memories of his turbulent life a dream he would forget “in this elevated place.”
A glass case in this chamber holds a wax cast of his face taken after death. It is brown, cracked, dreesome, the features greatly changed by sorrow and pain from those of a marble bust near by, and very unlike those of the frescoed portrait. The head is small and well-formed, the forehead high, with cavernous temples. A shriveled laurel-wreath is bound about them, discolored and brittle as the wax. The crucifix used by him in his last illness and which was enclasped by his dead hands is also exhibited, with his inkstand, a page of MS. and the iron box in which he lay buried until the erection of his monument. But for the graceful figure upon the wall in the corner by the left-hand window, and the view framed by the casements, we could not have remembered that life, no less than death, had been here;—still less, that this was, in truth, a Coronation-room.
Through the garden a broad alley leads between beds of thrifty vegetables to Tasso’s oak. From the shattered trunk, which has suffered grievously from the winds, shoots a single vigorous branch. We picked ivy and grasses from the earth about the roots where Tasso sat each day, while he could creep so far;—the city at his feet, the Campagna beyond the city unrolled to the base of the mountains, and Heaven beyond the hills. The only immortelle I saw growing in Italy, I found so near to Tasso’s oak that his foot must often have pressed the spot.
At the left of the oak, and winding along the crest of the hill is a terrace bordered by a low, broken wall, bright that day, with mid-winter turf and bloom. Rust-brown and golden wall-flowers were rooted among the stones; pansies smilingly pushed aside the grass to get a good look at the sun; daisies, like happy, lawless children, ran everywhere.
“This is what I crossed the Atlantic to see and to be!” Caput pronounced, deliberately, throwing himself down on the sward, and resting an elbow upon the wall, just where the flowers were thickest, the sunshine warmest, the prospect fairest. “You can go home when you like. I shall remain here until the antiquated fathers up at the house drive me from the premises. I can touch Heaven—as the Turks say—with my finger!”
While we affected to wait upon his pleasure, we remembered that a more genial saint than the patron of the convent—to wit—S. Filippo Neri, was wont to assemble here Roman children and teach them to sing and act his oratorios. What a music-gallery! And what a theme for artist’s brush or pen were those rehearsals under this sky, at this height, with the shadow of Tasso’s oak upon the al fresco concert-hall!
“The view from Tusculum is said to be more beautiful than this,” observed our head, murmurously, from the depths of his Turkish trance. “We will see it before the world is a week older!”