Meanwhile editions of his "Gerusalemme" were multiplying throughout Italy, and beyond the Alps and the Pyrenees; while the mind that conceived and produced it was wandering, like a lost star through the infinity of space, unaccompanied by any kindred planet, and unattracted by any parent sun; and the poet himself--he whom monarchs had delighted to honour, the associate of sovereigns, who had been the favourite of princesses, and the admiration or the envy of the highest intellects of his age--was treated as a brute, out of whose living frame the rational soul had departed, and whose animal appetites were to be subdued by severe abstinence, or controlled by harsh discipline. Yet in his solitude, when the first rigours of his imprisonment had been relaxed, and an apartment of less discomfort was allotted to him, he pursued, with unabated ardour and intensity, his studies, so far as he had the means, and poured out, as he was ever wont, his sorrows and his hopes, his remembrances and his imaginations, in every form of verse. Indeed, many of his most beautiful compositions are dated within the term of his captivity. In course of time, as he grew calmer, his friends, and illustrious strangers attracted by his fame, were permitted to visit him. Occasionally, too, a day of light and liberty was granted, and he was brought out of his prison-house to those splendid mansions which he loved to inhabit, and which he was so well qualified to adorn. Marfisa of Este, cousin to the duke, especially befriended him in this manner, and entertained him at her delightful villa, where, in company with her distinguished household and visiters, he looked abroad again in sunshine, with all a poet's transport and all an invalid's delight, when mere existence, void of suffering, is enjoyment. "See the wretch, who long has tost On the thorny bed of pain, At length repair his vigour lost, And breathe and walk again: The meanest floweret of the vale, The simplest note that swells the gale, The common air, the earth, the skies, To him are opening paradise." So sang Gray, and so felt Tasso for a few hours of freedom,--but soon remanded back to his lonely abode, he relapsed into despondency; and though one such day, while it lasted, might seem to compensate for all the past, yet when it was gone, its pleasures appeared too dearly purchased by the misery of another day rendered more bitter by the transient change.