FERRARA, 18 _September_ 1833. If there be a life that should make one despair of happiness for men of talent, it is Tasso's. The beautiful sky upon which his eyes looked when they opened to the light was a deceptive sky: "My adversities," he says, "began with my life. Cruel fortune snatched me from my mother's arms. I remember her kisses moist with tears, her prayers which the winds have carried away. I was not again to press my face to her face. With an uncertain step, like Ascanius or young Camillus, I followed my wandering and outlawed father. I grew up in poverty and exile." Torquato Tasso lost Bernardo Tasso[171] at Ostiglia. Torquato has killed Bernardo as a poet; he has made him live as a father. Drawn from obscurity by the publication of _Rinaldo_[172], Tasso was summoned to Ferrara. He made his first appearance there amid the festivals on the occasion of the marriage of Alphonsus II. with the Archduchess Barbara. He there met Leonora, Alphonsus' sister: love and misfortune ended in giving his genius all its beauty. "I saw," says the poet, describing, in _Aminta_[173], the first Court of Ferrara, "I saw charming goddesses and nymphs, without veils, without clouds: I felt the inspiration of a new virtue, of a new divinity, and I sang of war and heroes." Tasso read the stanzas of the _Gerusalemme_, as he composed them, to Alphonsus' two sisters, Lucrezia and Leonora. He was sent to the Cardinal Ippolito of Este[174], who was settled at the Court of France: he pawned his clothes and furniture to take that journey, while the cardinal whom he was honouring with his presence made Charles IX. the gorgeous present of one hundred Barbary horses with their Arab riders superbly dressed. Left at first in the stables, Tasso was afterwards presented to the Poet-King, the friend of Ronsard. In a letter which has been preserved for us, he judges the French harshly. He wrote a few verses of his _Gerusalemme_ in an abbey of men in France with which Cardinal Ippolito was endowed; this was Châlis, near Ermenonville, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to dream and die: Dante also had passed obscurely through Paris. Tasso returned to Italy in 1571 and did not witness the Massacre of St. Bartholomew[175]. He went straight to Rome and from there came back to Ferrara. _Aminta_ was played with great success. Although he became the rival of Ariosto, the author of _Rinaldo_ admired the author of _Orlando_ to such a degree that he refused the homage of that poet's nephew: [Sidenote: Tasso at Ferrara.] "This laurel which you offer me," he wrote, "the judgment of wise men, of men of the world and my own judgment have laid on the head of the man to whom you are bound by ties of blood. Prostrate before his image, I give him the most honourable titles that affection and respect are able to dictate to me. I will loudly proclaim him my father, my lord and my master."