"Ecco ramico spirito," he said, "che cortesemente è venuto a favellarmi."
Tasso in prison.
And Torquato conversed with a sun-beam. He re-entered the fatal city even as the bird flings itself into the jaws of the serpent that fascinates it. Disowned and spurned by the courtiers, taunted by the servants, he launched out into complaints, and Alphonsus ordered him to be locked up in a mad-house in the Hospital of Sant' Anna.
Then the poet wrote to one of his friends:
"Bowed down under the weight of my misfortunes, I have renounced all thoughts of glory; I should think myself lucky if I could only quench the thirst with which I am devoured....The idea of an unlimited captivity and my indignation at the ill-treatment to which I am subjected increase my despair. The filthiness of my beard, hair and clothes renders me an object of disgust to myself."
The prisoner implored the whole earth and even his pitiless persecutor; he drew from his lyre accents which ought to have made the walls to fall with which his wretchedness was girt about:
Piango il morir; non piango il morir solo,
Ma il modo . . . . . .
. . . . . . . .
Mi saria di conforto, aver la tomba,
Ch' altra mole innalzar credea co' carmi.
Lord Byron wrote a poem called the Lament of Tasso; but he cannot get away from himself and substitutes himself everywhere for the persons whom he sets before us; even as his genius lacks tenderness, his "lament" is no more than an imprecation.
Tasso addressed the following petition to the Council of the Ancients of Bergamo: