Choice Specimens of American Literature, and Literary Reader · Chapter 146=186.= Interest of Tasso's Life
This chapter is not translated yet. You are reading the original.
There is scarcely any poet whose life excites a more profound and melancholy interest than that of Torquato Tasso.
His short and brilliant career of glory captivates the imagination, while the heart is deeply affected by his subsequent misfortunes. Greater fame and greater misery have seldom been the lot of man, and a few brief years sufficed for each extreme.
An exile even in his boyhood, the proscription and confiscation suffered by his father deprived him of home and patrimony. Honor and love, and the favor of princes, and enthusiastic praise, dazzled his youth. Envy, malice, and treachery, tedious imprisonment and imputed madness, insult, poverty, and persecution, clouded his manhood. The evening of his days was saddened by a troubled spirit, want, sickness, bitter memories, and deluded hopes; and when at length a transient gleam of sunshine fell upon his prospects, death substituted the immortal for the laurel crown.
Mystery adds its fascination to his story. The causes of his imprisonment are hidden in obscurity; it is still disputed whether he was insane or not.
Few points of literary history, therefore, are more interesting, or more obscure, than the love, the madness, and the imprisonment of Tasso.
* * * * *
=George Ticknor, 1791-1871.= (Manual, p. 502.)
From "The History of Spanish Literature."