Is bound more closely by the magnet’s power
Than the same striving after lofty things
Doth bind the bard and warrior. Homer’s life
Was self-forgetfulness—he pour’d it forth,
One rich libation to another’s fame:
And Alexander through th’ Elysian grove
To seek Achilles and his poet flies.
Might I behold their meeting!”
But he is a reed shaken with the wind. Antonio reaches the Court of Ferrara at this crisis, in all the importance of a successful negotiation with the Vatican. He strikes down the wing of the poet’s delicate imagination with the arrows of a careless irony, and Tasso is for a time completely dazzled and overpowered by the worldly science of the skilful diplomatist. The deeper wisdom of his own simplicity is yet veiled from his eyes. Life seems to pass before him, as portrayed by the discourse of Antonio, like a mighty triumphal procession, in the exulting movements and clarion-sounds of which he alone has no share; and at last the forms of beauty, peopling his own spiritual world, seem to dissolve into clouds, even into faint shadows of clouds, before the strong glare of the external world, leaving his imagination as a desolate house, whence light and music have departed. He thus pours forth, when alone with the Princess Leonora, the impressions produced upon him by Antonio’s descriptions:—
They still disturb my heart—