Though such statements must be received with some allowance for the power of self-torturing which he possessed in no small degree, and exercised with as little forbearance as though he were his own most implacable enemy, yet, according to Tasso's representation, the treatment which he experienced under the hands of his brother-poet, Agostino Morti, formerly a disciple of Ariosto, the keeper of the hospital, was almost as bad as that which he received at his own. He says that by this man he was not allowed the necessaries of life, the medicines which his bodily disease required, nor the spiritual consolations which his heart-sickness needed: moreover, that his meditations were disturbed by the inmates of the house, so that he could not proceed with the preparation of his works for the press; but above all, that he was under the power of witchcraft, Morti being in league with certain magicians to destroy him by enchantments; and as this was a capital crime, he threatens to accuse the keeper to the duke.[41] His sonnets to the cats of the hospital, imploring them to lend him the light of their eyes to write by, are specimens of that _kind_ of mirth which suits and sets off melancholy, in a certain "humorous sadness." Their genuineness, however, is not certain, and they are hardly translatable. Whatever were the actual circumstances of Tasso's mental alienation and corporal sufferings from disease or ill usage, his life, from the period of his first imprisonment, was to himself like one of _the opium-eater's dreams_--splendours and horrors, alternations of agony and rapture, changes sudden, frequent, and strangely contrasted: he inhabited a world of _unrealities_, of which the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, were the more real in proportion as they were ideal, and therefore incurable; acting upon the soul itself like that effect upon the bodily senses, excruciatingly susceptible of impressions of pain, so happily imagined, and not less felicitously expressed by the most polished of our own poets:-- "Say what their use, were finer optics given? To inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven; Or touch, if tremblingly alive all o'er, To smart and agonise at every pore; Or, quick effluvia darting through the brain, Die of a rose in aromatic pain; If nature thunder'd in his opening ears, And stunn'd him with the music of the spheres. How would he wish that heaven had left him still The whispering zephyr and the purling rill." POPE's _Essay on Man_, Epist. I. And such a being, too exquisitely sensitive, is every poet, whose imagination or whose passion overmasters his reason and his judgment. Tasso was eminently such--a poet in every thing, and all life long.