"Tasso" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enough that Shakespear was too little esteemed by his own generation, or, for the matter of that, by any subsequent generation. The bargees on the Regent's Canal do not chant Shakespear's verses as the gondoliers in Venice are said to chant the verses of Tasso (a practice which was suspended for some reason during my stay in Venice: at least no gondolier ever did it in my hearing). Shakespear is no more a popular author than Rodin is a popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer. But Shakespear ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... we are indebted for the knowledge that in 1767 Mr. Hoole, the translator of Tasso, was living in Shire Lane, and from thence wrote to Dr. Percy, who was collecting his "Ancient Ballads," to ask him Dr. Wharton's address. Hoole was at that time writing a dramatic piece called Cyrus, for Covent Garden Theatre. He seems to have been an amiable man ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... a paltry nickel cent for your tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales? Will you sleep tonight between the ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... Patsy jumped up with alacrity, but Louise pleaded that she had several more letters to write; so the others left her and passed the rest of the forenoon in rummaging among the quaint shops of Sorrento, staring at the statue of Tasso, and enjoying the street scenes so vividly opposed to those of America. It was almost their first glimpse of foreign manners and customs. In Naples they had as yet seen nothing but darkness ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... Accius, Hostius, Bibaculus, and Varius before Virgil, Lucan and Silius after him, treated national subjects, some of great antiquity, some almost contemporaneous. But they failed, as Voltaire failed, because historical events are not by themselves the natural subjects of heroic verse. Tasso chose a theme where history and romance were so blended as to admit of successful epic treatment; but such conditions are rare. Few would hesitate to prefer the histories of Herodotus and Livy to any poetical account whatever of the Persian and ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... Spenser, discoursing to and with the universal heart of nature. Leigh Hunt, with more originality—more of the quality men call genius, but a less correct perception of what is really wanted—has done the same thing for the great Italian poets; and in his sparkling pages Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, and the rest of the tuneful train, appear unfettered by the more unpleasing peculiarities of their mortal time. But the criticism by which their steps are attended, though full of grace and acuteness, is absolute, not relative. They are judged by a standard of taste and feeling ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... the fatalities of travel, rather than any real interest in the poet, which led me to visit the prison of Tasso on the night of our arrival, which was mild and moonlit. The portier at the Stella d'Oro suggested the sentimental homage to sorrows which it is sometimes difficult to respect, and I went and paid this homage in the coal-cellar in which was never imprisoned the poet whose ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... in passing through one of the most delightful villas of Rome, overheard a stonemason chanting something in a strain of peculiar melancholy; and on inquiry, ascertained it to be the "Lament of Tasso." He soon learned that this celebrated piece was familiar to all the common people. Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of great merit, who was for many years deprived of liberty, and subjected to severe trials and misfortunes by the jealousy and cruelty of his patron, the Duke of Ferrara. That master-piece ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... Marceau; Clarens an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and Dante, "buried by the ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... outrivals Rene Ghil); the personal pronoun is also to disappear with the rest of the outmoded literary baggage, which was once so useful to such moribund mediocrities (the phrase is of Marinetti's making) as Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Alfieri; even D'Annunzio ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates and the Christian apostles belong to old days, but the world's martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so "persecuted they the prophets," not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... Sicilians. It is therefore inevitable that the twentieth century should find the Filocopo, Ameto, and Amorosa Visione tedious reading. The Teseide determined the form in which Pulci, Boiardo, Bello, Ariosto, Tasso, and, with a slight modification, our own Spenser were to write, but its readers are now few, and are not likely ever again to be numerous. Chaucer drew upon it for the Knight's Tale, but it is at any rate arguable that his retrenchment of its perhaps inordinate length was judicious, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... task to record, that Edward Fairfax, the harmonious and elegant translator of Tasso, prosecuted six of his neighbours at York assizes in the year 1622, for witchcraft on his children. "The common facts of imps, fits, and the apparition of the witches, were deposed against the prisoners." The grand jury found the bill, and the ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... leaders; and nothing less than the fear impending from their enemies could have kept them from mutinies upon this occasion. The difference was greatest among the horse, where every private trooper pretended to the chief command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Wither. The light-horse were commanded by Cowley and Despreaux. There came the bowmen under their valiant leaders, Descartes, Gassendi, and Hobbes; whose strength was such that they could shoot their arrows beyond the atmosphere, never to fall down ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... swept by unseen hands—those whose lips are mute because the soul of man hath never learned a language. Those we call master-poets and crown with immortelles but caught and fixed some far off echo of deep calling unto deep—the lines of Byron or a Burns, a Tasso or a Tennyson are but the half-articulate cries of a soul stifling with the splendor of ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... a Corilla!" mockingly exclaimed the pope. "Shall a Corilla desecrate the spot hallowed by the feet of Tasso and Petrarch? No, I say, no; when art becomes the plaything of a courtesan, then may the sacred Muses veil their heads and mourn in silence, but they must not degrade themselves by throwing away ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... would have been engraven on our minds like the heroes of the Iliad; and all future ages would have resounded with their exploits, as they have with those of Achilles and Agamemnon, of Ajax and Ulysses, of Hector and Diomede. But though Tasso has with incomparable beauty enshrined in immortal verse the feelings of chivalry, and the enthusiasm of the Crusades, he has not left a poem which has taken, or ever can take, the general hold of the minds of men, which the Iliad has ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... indeed, but little merit![49] Virgil has no originality. His epic poem is a mere echo of the Iliad, softened down in tone for the polite ears of Augustus and his courtiers. Virgil is inferior to Tasso. Tasso's characters are more vivid and distinct than Virgil's, and greatly more interesting. Virgil wants genius. Mezentius is the most heroical and pious of all the characters in the Aeneid. The Aeneid, I affirm, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... of their own. They even copy lines almost word for word from their great master. This is pure homage: it was their delight that such adaptations should be recognized—just as it was Spenser's hope, when he inserted translated stanzas from Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered in The Fairy Queen, to gain the honour of a true reproduction. Yet, strange fate for imitators! both, but Giles especially, were imitated by a greater than their worship—even by Milton. They make Spenser's ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... non-nourishing substance—a species of brandy and gruel!—diet for craving stomachs that can support nothing solider, and must have the weak stuff stiffened. Talking of poetry, there was an independent hereditary princess of Leiterstein in love with a poet!—a Leonora d'Este!—This was no Tasso. Nevertheless, she proposed to come to nuptials. Good, you observe? I confine myself to the relation of historical circumstances; in other words, facts; and of good ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... glowing buds and fragrant bloom. They all then dart forward together with a sparkling animation, a jealous emulation, defiling before the spectators as in a review—an enumeration of which would scarcely yield in interest to those given us, by Homer and Tasso, of the armies about to range themselves in the front of battle! At the close of an hour or two, the same circle again forms to end the dance; and on those days when amusement and pleasure fill all with an excited gayety, sparkling and glittering ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... higher and nobler than mere swashbuckling was in every editorial eye. The idea developed, as did the nobility and purity of Chivalry under Godfrey, the Agamemnon of Tasso. In all truly representative editorial minds the feeling grew that any power which their arms or training gave them should be exercised in the defense of the weak and oppressed. They renewed the old vow: "To maintain the just rights of such as are unable ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... left us after a fortnight's stay, and now the time had also come for the Bulows to depart. I accompanied them as far as Frankfort, where we spent two more days together to see a performance of Goethe's Tasso. Liszt's symphonic poem Tasso was to precede the play. It was with odd feelings that we witnessed this performance. Friederike Meyer as the Princess and Herr Schneider as Tasso appealed to us greatly, but Hans could not get over the shameful execution of Liszt's work by the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... grapple with difficulties, there was considerable beauty, but no longer the beauty of the mere peasant. And yet there was still about the whole countenance that expression of goodness and purity which a painter would give to his ideal of the peasant lover—such as Tasso would have placed in the Aminta, or Fletcher have admitted to the side of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... welcome as "the mighty magician bred and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition," and he despised the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, with firmness, that epic poetry—and he is thinking of Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser—would never have been written if the critical judgments current in 1754 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Discourses, and practical form in his retirement from the town. The slow depravation of the affective life was hastened by solitude, by sensuous expansion, by the long musings of literary composition. Well does Goethe's Princess warn the hapless Tasso:— ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... visited, containing the sarcophagus described by Dr. Waagen, Hogarth's pictures, a fine Canaletto, and a manuscript of Tasso. It fills the house once the residence of his body, still of his mind. It is not a mind with which I have sympathy; I found there no law of harmony, and it annoyed me to see things all jumbled together as if in an old curiosity-shop. Nevertheless it was a generous bequest, and much may ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... progress, and soon excelled in all branches of classics and literature. He delighted in poetry, and in later years wrote several essays on Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto, besides composing some tolerable poems himself. He played skilfully on several musical instruments, especially on the lute, of which indeed he became a master, and on which he solaced himself when quite an old man. Besides this, he seems to have ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... might be expected, the Greek manuscripts in it were particularly numerous and choice. The printed books were good, but they were not equal to the manuscripts either in interest or value. Among the latter was the original manuscript of Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, with some alterations of verses in the margin, likewise in the handwriting of Tasso. This sold for two hundred and four pounds, fifteen shillings. Four Greek manuscripts of the eleventh century: a copy of the ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher
... pursue to death this spiteful knight: Not earth's low centre, nor sea's deepest part, Nor heaven, nor hell, can shield him from my might: I will o'ertake him, take him, cleave his heart. FAIRFAX' TASSO. ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... occupying a rock-bound islet lying off the south-west coast of Moresby Island, near the western entrance to Houston Stewart Channel. There are five other villages on the west coast of the islands, all abandoned, and most of them in ruins. Tasso, on Tasso Harbour, Gold Harbour, between Gold Harbour and Skidegate Channel, picturesque Chathl, on Canoe Passage, near its western entrance, Lenna-how, on Graham Island, opposite Nesto Island, Tiahn on Tiahn Cove, between ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden
... nor observed any unity of action, or compass of time, or moderation in the vastness of his draught: his style is luxurious without majesty or decency, and his adventures without the compass of nature and possibility. Tasso, whose design was regular, and who observed the roles of unity in time and place more closely than Virgil, yet was not so happy in his action: he confesses himself to have been too lyrical—that is, to have ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... work of man has had such a wide and profound influence as this poem of Virgil,—a textbook in all schools since the revival of learning, the model of the Carlovingian poets, the guide of Dante, the oracle of Tasso. Virgil was born seventy years before Christ, and was seven years older than Augustus. His parentage was humble, but his facilities of education were great. He was a most fortunate man, enjoying the friendship of Augustus ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... other day, Werner compared women to the enchanted forest of which Tasso tells in his ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... grounded in her Italian; so, instead of grammars, these young people fell to reading the native poets, and began with Tasso—a course of studies well calculated to produce more results than one; but Brown did not understand Italian, though he was a splendid musician, and repeated it like a parrot. Besides, what did Eliza know about Tasso, Petrarch, Dante, or any of those wild fellows ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... Chenier, and many others of our contemporaries. Then I have read, of course, Moliere, Racine, Corneille, besides many other lesser French writers. Of foreign authors, I am intimate with the works of Gozzi, Goldoni, Guarini, Bibbiena, Machiavelli, Secchi, Tasso, Ariosto, and Fedini. Whilst of those of antiquity I know most of the work of Euripides, ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... made the fair princess a rich return for her patronage; her own letters show her to us as a woman of unshaken firmness, full of kindliness and humorous observation. Bembo, Bandello, Ariosto, and Bernardo Tasso sent their works to this court, small and powerless as it was, and empty as they found its treasury. A more polished and charming circle was not to be seen in Italy, since the dissolution (1508) of the old Court of Urbino; and in one respect, in freedom of movement, the society of Ferrara ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... their leaps. One of these, of a size which would have shattered the carriage to pieces, came whirling and crashing down just in the direction which it had quitted. The whole spot, in short, is such as Tasso might have imagined to be the scene of Ismeno's incantation, and the congress of devils whom he convoked; and at a sudden turn of the road, the Chateau Negro peeps from between the opposite heights in such a new and striking position, ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... me about those heavenly things!" He waved despairing hands. "They are too lovely. I've been quoting Tasso to that little signorina of a writing-desk. But, dear man, we can't possibly install any of it for at least a month. These things are exquisite, priceless, but so antique they've got to be mothered like babies. The chests ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... solid sense and lively passion. The reigning genius is then diametrically opposite to that which prevails on the first origin of arts. The Italian writers, it is evident, even the most celebrated, have not reached the proper simplicity of thought and composition; and in Petrarch, Tasso, Guarini, frivolous witticisms and forced conceits are but too predominant. The period during which letters were cultivated in Italy was so short, as scarcely to allow leisure for correcting ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... in Strength outdone: And see the Prize of Wit from Tasso won: See Corneil's Skill and Decency Refin'd; See Rapin's Art, and Molier's Fire Outshin'd; See Dryden's Lamp to our admiring View, Brought from the Tomb ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... career of the warrior, who viewed the slaughter of unoffending peasants and of simple burghers with as much indifference as that of the wild-boar or the red-deer which it was his pastime and his privilege to destroy. Who does not remember the beautiful passage in Tasso, where the crusaders burst into tears at the sight ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... better for his good companionship and ready wit. He was, in fact, a pleasant companion, fond of a good story, fonder still of his dog and gun, fondest of all of talking about poetry and reciting verses, which he could do by the hour,—sometimes repeating whole pages from Dante or Petrarch or Tasso or his favorite of all, Alfieri,—and sometimes extemporizing sonnets, or terzine, or odes, with that wonderful facility which Nature has given to the Italian improvvisatore and denied to the rest of mankind. It has often been remarked that ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Katy had been sitting on the ledge of the bookcase in the Library, poring over a book. It was called Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. The man who wrote it was an Italian, but somebody had done the story over into English. It was rather a queer book for a little girl to take a fancy to, but somehow Katy liked it very much. It told about knights, and ladies, and giants, ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... diadem which they wanted to put on me. You may believe, though, that it was a splendid piece. Pictures in miniature, not painted, but living, really existing miniatures of fourteen of the noblest poets were made into a wreath. It was Homer and Pindar, Tasso and Virgil, Schiller, Petrarch, Ariosto, Goethe, Sophocles, Leopold, Milton, and several more. Between each one of them burned a radiant star, not of tinsel, but of real cosmic material. In the middle of my forehead there was the figure of a lyre on ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... century, this flowering of the Slav spirit, might be looked upon as assailing "the integrity of the Turkish Empire," it was only allowed to circulate in MS. until 1830. According to Dr. Murko,[26] Professor of Slav Language and Literature at the University of Leipzig, this work surpasses Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered; but it is commonly thought that there is more literary merit in Gunduli['c]'s Dubravka, a lovely, patriotic pastoral. The worthy Franciscan Ka[vc]i['c],[27] who followed him with a work—Familiar Conversations on the Slovene Nation—would perhaps be ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... fond Petrarch shroud his Laura's praise, And Tasso cease to publish his affect, Since mine the faith confirmed at all assays, And hers the fair, which all men do respect. My lines her fair, her fair my faith assures; Thus I by love, and love by ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... tendency to clothe stale truisms and feeble sentiments in high-sounding language is still found in Italian prose and is indirectly traceable to the same source. As for the literature of the country since the Latins, it consisted, and still consists, in the works of the four poets, Dante, Tasso, Ariosto, and Petrarch. Leopardi is more read now than then, but is too unhealthily melancholy to be read long by any one. There used to be Roman princes who spent years in committing to memory the verses of those four poets, just as the young Brahman of to-day learns ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... in order to do magnificent honour to that festival; but the plan was carried no further, by reason of events that supervened no long time after. That first car of the Mint, then, was made under the direction of Cecca by Domenico, Marco, and Giuliano del Tasso, who were among the best master-carpenters, both in squared-work and in carving, who were then working in Florence; and in this car, among other things, no small praise is due to the wheels below it, which are pivoted, in order that the structure may be ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... weakness of exhausted nature, and the mind, in the last moments of life, is fraught with finer feelings than had belonged to the character of previous existence. It is a moment similar to that in which Tasso has so beautifully described the change in Clorinda's mind, after she had been mortally wounded by the hand of Tancred, but in which he was enabled to give her the inspiration of a greater faith, and the charity of a ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... of the Italian sonnet, as copied by Sidney from Bembo and Molza and Costanzo, contained within it the exotic and exquisite ideal passion of the "Vita Nuova" and Petrarch. With the bright, undulating stanza Spenser received from Ariosto and Tasso the richly coloured spirit of the Italian descriptive epic. With the splendid involutions of Machiavelli's and Guicciardini's prose Bacon learned their cool and disimpassioned philosophy. From the ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Charlemagne, in letters of gold; the signature of San Carlo Borromeo, and a Greek testament of the thirteenth century, which had been used by Erasmus in making his translation and contains notes in his own hand. The most interesting article was the "Jerusalem Delivered" of Tasso, in the poet's own hand, with his erasions ...
— Views a-foot • J. Bayard Taylor
... of your poets? Petrarch, or Tasso, or Dante? Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine? Cieco di Hadria? I have read ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... Rackrent often bought. The bookseller, an open-hearted man, begged us to look at a book of poems just published by a Leicester lady, a Miss Watts. I recollected to have seen some years ago a specimen of this lady's proposed translation of Tasso, which my father had highly admired. He told the bookseller that we would pay our respects to Miss Watts, if it would be agreeable to her. When we had dined, we set out with our enthusiastic bookseller. We were shown by the light of a lanthorn along a very narrow ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... has more likeness than the Odyssey to the common pattern of later sophisticated epics. But the war of Troy is not the subject of the Iliad in the same way as the siege of Jerusalem is the subject of Tasso's poem. The story of the Aeneid can hardly be told in the simplest form without some reference to the destiny of Rome, or the story of Paradise Lost without the feud of heaven and hell. But in the Iliad, the assistance of the Olympians, or even the presence of the whole of Greece, ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... rudiments of Italian poetry. But their taste and composition must have been extremely barbarous, as we may judge by those who followed the turn of their fable in much politer times; such as Boiardo, Bernardo, Tasso, Ariosto, etc. ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... same "dear" could be thoroughly raked and hoed out of the connubial garden, I don't think that the remaining nettles would signify a button. But even as it was, Parson Dale, good man, would have prized his garden beyond all the bowers which Spenser and Tasso have sung so musically, though there had not been a single specimen of "dear," whether the dear humilis, or the dear superba; the dear pallida, rubra, or nigra; the dear umbrosa, florens, spicata; the dear savis, or the dear horrida;—no, ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... Matthew Hale, bequeathed to Lincoln's Inn, to avoid their mutilation by the licensers of the press, 220; slaves employed to copy, 398; of the Vision of Alberico, preserved in the king's library at Paris, 422: of Galileo's annotations on Tasso, 444; destruction of Hugh Broughton's, by Speed, 445; destruction of Leland's, by Polydore Vergil, ib.; dilapidation of the Harleian, 446; suppression of one relating to Sixtus IV. by Fabroni, ib.; ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... of course. Why we're to have music—beautiful instruments and songs; and not Tasso declaimed as in the guide-books either. She has arranged it—or at least I have. That is Eugenio has. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... 'Diodati as in name, so indeed God's gift to me,' and a 'guide-fish' who in this 'rockie-rough ocean' helped him to capture the 'Whale'—that is, Montaigne. He also compares him to a 'bonus genius sent to me, as the good angel to Raimond in "Tasso," for my assistant to ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... Clothing the French Prisoners; the Preface to Bolt's Dictionary of Trade and Commerce; a Dedication to the King, of Kennedy's Complete System of Astronomical Chronology, unfolding the Scriptures; and a Dedication to the Queen, of Hoole's Tasso. ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... and antiquary, a county gentleman of Cornwall, ed. at Oxf., made a translation of the first five cantos of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered (1594), more correct than that of Fairfax. Other works were A Survey of Cornwall (1602), and an Epistle concerning the Excellencies of ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... every one, conquered by her marvelous beauty and her lofty air, stood respectfully aside, and almost bowed down before her passage. Franz, at once dazzled and enchanted, followed her at a sufficient distance. At the moment she arrived in the last hall a handsome young man wearing the costume of Tasso was singing, accompanying himself on the guitar, a romance in honor of Venice. She walked straight toward him, and looking; fixedly at him asked him who he was that dared to wear such a costume and to sing of Venice. The young man, overwhelmed by her look, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... artificiality and pretense his verse is generally simple, sincere, and passionate. His work is mainly a record of suffering, the note of joy being relatively infrequent. He is a forerunner of those modern poets of whom one may say with Goethe's Tasso: Mir gab ein Gott zu sagen, wie ich leide. The text follows Fulda's edition in Krschner's ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... the interest of the story increases, but the verse is more compressed, the expressions are more graphic, and the flow of the stanza is finer and more natural. The opening lines are as vivid and impressive as a passage from Tasso: ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... Ferrara, which stretched along the plain in a low line of roofs, with a few towers breaking the uniformity. Presenting my "pass" to the sentinel at the barrier, I entered the city in which Calvin had found an asylum and Tasso ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... the European languages during the same lapse of time, the very tongue in which wrote Bertran de Born and Pierre Vidal, the idiom in which Dante and Petrarca found some of their happiest inspirations, and which, we are told, Tasso ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... the enemy of Dryden's reputation. Witness the Battle of the Books:—"The difference was greatest among the horse" says he of the moderns, "where every private trooper pretended to the command, from Tasso and Milton to Dryden and Withers." And in Poetry, a Rhapsody, ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... passed in the class of rhetoric, and succeeded, moreover, in recovering his Ariosto, but read very little of it, partly from the difficulty he found in understanding it, and partly because the continued breaks in the story disgusted him. As to Tasso, he had never even heard his name. He obtained a few of Metastasio's plays as libretti of the Opera at carnival time, and was much pleased with them, and also with some of Goldoni's comedies that ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Spanish, English, and German versions followed each other in rapid succession, and the Cortegiano was universally acclaimed as the most popular prose work of the Italian Renaissance. "Have you read Castiglione's Cortegiano?" asks the courtier Malpiglio, in Tasso's dialog. "The beauty of the book is such that it deserves to be read in all ages; as long as courts endure, as long as princes reign and knights and ladies meet, as long as valor and courtesy hold a place in our hearts, the name of Castiglione ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... In Venice, Tasso's echoes are no more, And silent rows the songless gondolier; Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, And music meets not always now the ear: Those days are gone—but beauty still is here. States fall, arts fade—but Nature ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... Italian writers may be mentioned Boiardo, on account of his Orlando Innamorato, and Ariosto, who wrote Orlando Furioso. Upon the whole, the writings of the period were not worthy of its intellectual development, although Torquato Tasso, in his Jerusalem Delivered, presents the first crusade as Homer presented the Trojan War. The small amount of really worthy literature of this age has been attributed to ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... It was introduced, along with so much else from Italy, by Wyatt, and was then employed for different purposes by Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and others.[57] At the close of the eighteenth century it enjoyed a rebirth. "It had already been used by Harrington, Drayton, Fairfax (in his translation of Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered), and ... in later times by Gay; and it had even been used by Frere's contemporary, William Tennant; but to Frere belongs the honour of giving it the special characteristics which Byron ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... it is often impossible to determine which version of events is most reliable. No important fact has been stated without good historical authority, but one or two minor incidents of Godfrey's life and crusade were taken from Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered." In the treatment of a few unimportant events, some imaginative details and circumstances strictly in harmony with the meagre historical record of facts have been added to give color and interest to the narrative. ...
— With Spurs of Gold - Heroes of Chivalry and their Deeds • Frances Nimmo Greene
... night, long after Tasso Simone and most of his family were wrapped in slumber, the door of his dwelling was softly opened, whereupon a slight, girlish figure stole forth and sped noiselessly across the vineyard of olive trees, toward the highway which skirted ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... affected, Miriam, if you apply that word again to that old commonplace. If he were sublime, do you suppose all the world would read him or go to see his plays? Do reserve that epithet for Milton, Dante, Tasso, Schiller, and the like inaccessibilities. Yes, I do revere 'Wallenstein' more than any thing Shakespeare ever spouted"—in answer to my gently-shaking head—"I should break down over Thekla, I ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... greatness of soul in the forgiveness of what to others would seem unpardonable! What love of humanity and of its rights! What hatred of injustice, tyranny, and oppression in the "Ode to Venice," in "The Lament of Tasso," in "The Prophecy of Dante," and in general in all his latter poems, even in the "Isle," a poem little known, which was written a short time before he left Genoa for Greece. Here, more than in any other of his poems, we see the admirable peace of mind which he ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... working all day long and never addressing a word to anyone, not even during the meals. He only became a sociable being on holidays, on which occasions he would spend his time with his friends in some tavern, coming home at midnight as drunk as a lord and singing verses from Tasso. When in this blissful state the good man could not make up his mind to go to bed, and became violent if anyone attempted to compel him to lie down. Wine alone gave him sense and spirit, for when sober he was incapable of attending to the simplest family matter, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... grows backwards." Ben had good reason for what he said of the wits. Not to speak of science, of Galileo and Kepler, the sixteenth century was a spendthrift of literary genius. An attack of immortality in a family might have been looked for then as scarlet-fever would be now. Montaigne, Tasso, and Cervantes were born within the same fourteen years; and in England, while Spenser was still delving over the propria que maribus, and Raleigh launching paper navies, Shakspeare was stretching his baby hands for the moon, and the little Bacon, chewing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... beforehand—the time to be allotted, for instance, to a carriage drive, or to visiting. Mr. Hope-Scott himself said of her, that if she lay down on the sofa in the afternoon to enjoy a few hours of Dante or Tasso, you might be sure that every note had been answered, every account set down and carefully backed up, every domestic matter thoroughly arranged. As Lady Davy expressed it, 'she was a very busy little housewife, ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby
... head." "I long to be purified in triple fire so as to be worthy of you." He addresses a prayer to her and says: "On my knees I implore you to complete your work and make a good man of me." "While writing Tasso, I worshipped you." Charlotte knew intuitively what he desired of her, and remained silent and passive like the Madonna. Not a single sensual, or even passionate word, replied to ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... leads me to suppose, he considered them capable of original poetry. Mr. Addison, in his account of Italy, says, "I cannot forbear mentioning a custom at Venice, which they tell me is peculiar to the common people of this country, of singing stanzas out of Tasso. They are set to a pretty solemn tune, and when one begins in any part of the poet, it is odds, but he will be answered by somebody else that overhears him; so that sometimes you have ten or a dozen in the neighbourhood of one another, taking verse after verse, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... names—Stefaneschi, Anguillara, Mattei, Raphael, Tasso. The story of the first has been told already. Straight from the end of the new bridge that bears the name of Garibaldi, stands the ancient tower of the great Guelph house of Anguillara that fought the Orsini long and fiercely, and went down at last before them, when ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... the translator of Tasso and Ariosto—was Rich's chief machinist at this period, and the inventor of this famous serpent. He had, according to Cumberland, a shop where he sold mechanical toys. Having a large stock of serpent toys left on his hands he became a ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... become acquainted with some of my compositions (to which, whether intentionally or not, she had hitherto not paid much attention). I played with her my arrangement of the Symphonic Poems for 2 pianofortes—the "Heroide funebre," "Tasso," and the "Preludes"—which she received with kindly and courteous tolerance. Without desiring more—for ample experience has taught me that my compositions more readily rouse estrangement than attraction—I should, nevertheless, ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... within him speedily revived with all the power and with more than all the beauty of his first attempts. He meditated three subjects as the groundwork for lyrical dramas. One was the story of Tasso; of this a slight fragment of a song of Tasso remains. The other was one founded on the Book of Job, which he never abandoned in idea, but of which no trace remains among his papers. The third was the "Prometheus Unbound". The Greek tragedians were now his most familiar ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... [The Tasso, with the perusal of which Mrs. Dunlop indulged the poet, was not the line version of Fairfax, but the translation of ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... may be here reminded of the necessity of rendering instruction agreeable to youth, and of Tasso's infusion of honey into the medicine prepared for a child; but an age in which children are taught the driest doctrines by the insinuating method of instructive games, has little reason to dread the consequences ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... olive-trees, gardens of oranges and lemons, orchards, heaped-up rocks, green gorges in the hills—and by the bases of snow-covered heights, and through small towns with handsome, dark-haired women at the doors—and pass delicious summer villas—to Sorrento, where the poet Tasso drew his inspiration from the beauty surrounding him. Returning, we may climb the heights above Castellamare, and looking down among the boughs and leaves, see the crisp water glistening in the sun; and clusters of white houses ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... be those who have essayed Her gloomy Dives and Afrites to compel. But by perception of the secret powers Of mineral springs in Nature's inmost cell, Of herbs in curtain of her greenest bowers, And of the moving stars o'er mountain tops and towers. Wiffen's "Translation of Tasso," cant. xiv. xliii. ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... The water, foaming and flashing, and then escaping amid huge gray stones on its troubled course—clear and transparent, expanding into tranquil pools, with the flickering sunshine through the dense foliage—all combine to form at scene such as Tasso ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... develop, and then—and then you will be completely wonderful. When this strike is over, when we have time, I will teach you many things—develop you. We will read Sorel together he is beautiful, like poetry—and the great poets, Dante and Petrarch and Tasso—yes, and d'Annunzio. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... I made about this time was an acquaintance with Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, through the flat medium of Mr. Hoole's translation. But above all, I then first became acquainted with Bishop Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry. As I had been from infancy devoted to legendary lore of this nature, and only reluctantly withdrew my attention, from ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... Emery, dressed as Tom Tug, sang it at his last mortal benefit at Covent Garden; and ever since it has been a great favorite with the watermen of Thames, who time their oars to it, as the wherrymen of Venice time theirs to the lines of Tasso. With the watermen it went naturally to Vauxhall, and over land to Sadler's Wells. The Guards—not the mail coach, but the Lifeguards—picked it out from a fluttering hundred of others, all going to one air, against the dead wall at Knightsbridge. ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... scenes like these, which, daring to depart From sober truth, are still to nature true, And call forth fresh delight to Fancy's view, Th' heroic muse employed her Tasso's art! How have I trembled, when, at Tancred's stroke, Its gushing blood the gaping cypress poured; When each live plant with mortal accents spoke, And the wild blast upheaved the vanished sword! How ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... Renaissance we find the theme reproduced by Tasso;[119] and it had doubtless been freely used by Shakspere's English predecessors and contemporaries. What he did was but to set the familiar theme to a rhetoric whose superb sonority must have left theirs tame, as it leaves Seneca's ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... separately, and at considerable intervals of time. First carne the army of Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine, the pride of his age for all noble and knightly virtues, immortalized by the poet Tasso. He had risen from a sick-bed to join the crusade, and sold his lordship to raise the necessary money; around his standard assembled many of the best knights of the age. In the month of August, 1096, they commenced their march, through ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... unknown until 1821, when Count Nilzi described the copy in his collection. Of the "Gigante Moronte", Wellesley has an absolutely unique copy. A thirteenth-century commentary on Peter Lombard's "Sentences" has marginal notes by Tasso, and a contemporary copy of Savonarola's "Triumph of the Cross" shows on the title page a woodcut of the frate writing in his cell. Bembo's "Asolini" a first edition, contains autograph corrections. In 1912, Wellesley had the unusual opportunity, ...
— The Story of Wellesley • Florence Converse
... victorious in the Holy Land, and the Seljukian Sultan, the cousin of Malek Shah, driven back from his capital over against Constantinople, to an obscure town on the Cilician border of Asia Minor. This is that Sultan Soliman, who plays so conspicuous a part in Tasso's celebrated Poem of ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... a boy Tasso. But he has suffered; he is not a child any more, though his face is smooth as mine. He must ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... of those allegorical fables, which, passing so frequently through the mediums of version and imitation, have generally lost their finest rays in the transmission. Many of the Italian poets have indulged their fancies upon the subjects; and in the manner of Anacreon, Bernardo Tasso first introduced the metre, which was afterwards polished and enriched ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... than any other English work, the many-sided literary influences of the renascence. It was the blossom of a richly composite culture. Its immediate models were Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, printed in 1581. Both of these were, in subject, romances of chivalry, the first based upon the old Charlemagne epos—Orlando being identical with the hero of the French Chanson de Roland—the second upon the history of the first Crusade, ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... it in the past, when castles were more picturesque than comfortable. When the amber-tinted towers are seen through the haze of a summer morning against the background of wooded hill, one thinks that in just such a castle as this Tasso or Spenser would have put an enchantress, whose wiles, combined with the indolent influence of the valley, few pilgrim knights taking the eastward way to Roc-Amadour would ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and joined Clayton and Dieupart in the service of the opera, until Handel's success superseded them. Haym was also a man of letters, who published two quartos upon Medals, a notice of rare Italian Books, an edition of Tasso's Gerusalemme, and two tragedies of his own. He wrote a History of Music in Italian, and issued proposals for its publication in English, but had no success. Finally he turned picture collector, and was employed in that quality by Dr. Mead and ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... discussion of the man of genius, gives many examples of precocious poetical and musical talent: Dante (who at nine years of age wrote sonnets), Tasso (wrote at ten years of age), Wieland (who wrote an epic at 16), Lope de Vega (who wrote verses at 12), Calderoii (at 13), Metastasio (who composed at 10), Handel (who wrote a mass at 13, and was director of opera at 19), Eichhorn, Mozart, and Eibler (all three of whom gave concerts ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... of Becker. She travelled in Austro-Hungary and Italy. In the Kunsthalle at Karlsruhe is her picture of "St. Elizabeth and the Child John." Among her best works are "The Death of St. Catherine of Alexandria," "The Death of Tasso," and twelve illustrations for a volume of ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... have rendered all appropriate; so completely did she seem the natural Spirit of the Place; so wonderfully did her beauty, elated as it now was with contented love, gratified vanity, exultant hope, body forth the brightest vision that ever floated before the eyes of Tasso, when he wrought into one immortal shape the glory of the Enchantress with the ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... got a most beautiful sum in Compound Proportion, about a lion, a wolf, and a bear eating up a carcase, and as soon as they have done it, you shall hear me say my ancient geography, and then we will do a nice bit of Tasso; and if we have any time after that, I have got such a thing to tell you—only I must not tell you now, or I shall go on talking ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... twenty buildings, with five annexes—seven thousand pupils. Among such a multitude there has been no difficulty in finding one boy for each region of Italy. Two representatives of the Islands were found in the Torquato Tasso schoolhouse, a Sardinian, and a Sicilian; the Boncompagni School furnished a little Florentine, the son of a wood-carver; there is a Roman, a native of Rome, in the Tommaseo building; several Venetians, ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... Sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a salary of L300 a year. While he continued in his father's office he had made himself familiar with the French and Italian languages, and had read many of their more celebrated authors, especially the writings of Tasso and Ariosto. Some years after he came to the bar, he was induced to acquaint himself with the ballad poetry of Germany, then in vogue, through the translations of Mr Lewis, whose friendship he had recently acquired. In 1796 he made his first adventure as an author by publishing ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... most celebrated and beautiful Italian poems, the "Jerusalem Delivered" of Tasso, has "the pious Godfrey" for the presiding hero of the glorious scenes which it narrates. But there are no grounds for supposing that his fame belongs to romance rather than history. Contemporary writers have painted his portrait in no less flattering colors than Tasso ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 1 of 8 • Various
... And stout Rinaldo gain'd his Bride, &c.] A story in Tasso, an Italian Poet, of a hero that gained his mistress ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... care to say so. The Sicilian, however, no matter how uneducated he may be, has an appetite for romance which must be gratified and, as it would give him some trouble to brush up his early accomplishments and stay at home reading Pulci and Boiardo, Tasso and Ariosto, he prefers to follow the story of Carlo Magno and his paladins and the wars against the Saracens in the teatrino. Besides, no Sicilian man ever stays at home to do anything except to eat and sleep, ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... Gregorius of Venice in 1494. Old bindings may be seen too, among them a lavish Byzantine example with enamels and mosaics. The exhibited autographs include Titian's hand large and forcible; Leopardi's, very neat; Goldoni's, delicate and self-conscious; Galileo's, much in earnest; and a poem by Tasso with myriad afterthoughts. ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... a special fame from the munificence of the House of Este and the memory of Olympia Morata. A long line of illustrious princes had built up 'an Athens in the midst of Boeotia.' Ariosto sang the praises of the literary Court, and Tasso's misfortunes were due to his eagerness in accepting its pleasures. The library of Lilio Giraldi was a meeting-place for the scholars of Italy, and it continued to be the pride of Ferrara when it passed to Cinthio Giraldi ...
— The Great Book-Collectors • Charles Isaac Elton and Mary Augusta Elton
... relates the whole series of this second Gothic war and the victory of Narses, (l. iv. c. 21, 26—35.) A splendid scene. Among the six subjects of epic poetry which Tasso revolved in his mind, he hesitated between the conquests of Italy by Belisarius and by Narses, (Hayley's Works, vol. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... the ideas in the preface to Ibrahim were not new even in 1641 becomes plain if one reads the discussions of romance written by Giraldi Cinthio and Tasso.[2] The particular way in which Mlle. de Scudery attempted to carry out those ideas in her later, more subjective works she obligingly set forth in Clelie in the passage already alluded to. There it is explained that a well-contrived ...
— Prefaces to Fiction • Various
... full also of character and kindliness. One of his early letters he closes, as being from his correspondent's "afflicted, headachey, sore-throatey, humble servant." In another he calls Hoole's translation of Tasso "more vapid than smallest small beer, 'sun-vinegared.'" In speaking of Hazlitt's intention to print a political pamphlet at his own expense, he comes out with a general maxim, which has found many disciples: "The first duty of an author, I take it, is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... the treasures of classic lore in music and literature. Homer, Herodotus, Plato, she has read, with Tasso and his chivalrous lays, and Spenser and his stately verse. In music, Glueck and Gretry, Beethoven and Boieldieu's dulcet tones have helped to ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... of the greatest epic of the Middle Age, that 'Dante, in common with many fathers of the Church, under the supposition that paganism, in the persons of the infernal gods, represented the fallen angels, has made no scruple to adopt its fables.' Tasso, at a later period, introduces the deities of heathendom. In the Gerusalemme Liberata they sit in council to frustrate the plans and destroy the forces of the Christian leaders before Jerusalem (iv). Ismeno, a powerful magician in the ranks of the Turks, brings up a ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams
... the greater part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of touch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the old way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Moliere, Cervantes and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form of an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been inspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place in the recognized school ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... And streaming toward Venice. It is black under the gondola hood, But the yellow of a satin dress Glares out like the eye of a watching tiger. Yellow compassed about with darkness, Yellow and black, Gorgeous—barbaric. The boatman sings, It is Tasso that he sings; The lovers seek each other beneath their mantles, And the gondola drifts over the lagoon, aslant to the coming dawn. But at Malamocco in front, In Venice behind, Fall the leaves, Brown, And yellow streaked with brown. ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... Goethe's "Tasso." Now I am at the "Sorrows of Werther." I am wonderfully impressed with his dramatic power. The "Egmont," "Iphigenia," and "Tasso" are grander than anything I know in modern literature, than anything else of his which I have read. The serene simplicity of the "Iphigenia" ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... Duvidney ladies. In one of these well-ordered houses must they have lived and sighed over Victor's tangled life—surrounded by laurels and laburnum; the lawn either cut yesterday or to be cut to-day; the semicircular drive a miracle of gravel unalloyed; a pan of water for Tasso beside the dazzling step. Receding a hundred years, the same author peoples Tunbridge Wells again, for it was here, in its ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... art like Jerusalem Delivered or Paradise Lost. We do not know who put together in their present form such traditional tales as the Lay of the Nibelungs and Beowulf, and the personal element in the narrative is only obscurely felt, whereas Jerusalem Delivered is a constant revelation of Tasso, and the personality of Milton colors every line in Paradise Lost. When Matthew Arnold tells us that Homer is rapid, plain, simple and noble, he is depicting the characteristics of a poet as well as the impression made ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Arthur's artless successors four hundred years ago; or dished up anew in something of a Ballad Style like his own Lady of Shalott, rather than elaborated into a modern Epic form. I never cared, however, for any chivalric Epic; neither Tasso, nor Spenser, nor even Ariosto, whose Epic has a sort of Ballad-humour in it; Don Quixote is the only one of all this sort I have ever ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... arras its walls; and the space covered by its numerous compartments would have contained the halls and outworks of an ordinary castle. The pomp of that camp realised the wildest dreams of Gothic, coupled with Oriental splendour; something worthy of a Tasso to have imagined, or a Beckford to create. Nor was the exceeding costliness of the more courtly tents lessened in effect by those of the soldiery in the outskirts, many of which were built from boughs, still retaining their leaves—savage and picturesque huts;—as if, realising old legends, ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book IV. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not;" but the mounted jockey who bestrode our towing horse was; and, in lieu of waking the echoes with choice extracts from Tasso in the liquid Venesian or harsh, gritty Tuscan dialect, he occasionally beguiled his monotonous jog-trot with a plaintive ballad, in which he rehearsed the charms of a certain "Pretty little Sarah;" or else, "made the welkin ring"—though ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... learning, modesty, and virtue of the fair young Englishman. And ere Frank returned to Germany he had satiated his soul with all the wonders of that wondrous land. He had talked over the art of sonneteering with Tasso, the art of history with Sarpi; he had listened, between awe and incredulity, to the daring theories of Galileo; he had taken his pupils to Venice, that their portraits might be painted by Paul Veronese; he had seen the palaces of Palladio, and the merchant princes on the Rialto, and ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... dangers at the battle of Jena. When she rode before her troops in her helmet of polished steel, shaded by a plume, in her glittering golden cuirass, her tunic of silver stuff, her red boots with gold spurs, she resembled Tasso's heroines. The soldiers burst into cries of enthusiasm, as they saw their warlike Queen; before her were bowed the flags she had embroidered with her own hands, and the old, torn, and battle-stained standards of Frederick the Great. After the battle she was obliged to take ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... ago. I hope he slept well. But more important than the sleep, or even death, of a king, is the birth of a poet, I take it; and within this inclosure, on the eleventh day of March, 1541, Torquato Tasso, most melancholy of men, first saw the light; and here was born his noble sister Cornelia, the descendants of whose union with the cavalier Spasiano still live here, and in a manner keep the memory of the poet green with the present generation. I ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the moderns, their success has been, greatest who have most endeavoured to make these antients their pattern. The most considerable genius appears in the famous Tasso, and our Spenser. Tasso in his Aminta has far excelled all the pastoral writers, as in his Gierusalemme he has outdone the Epic Poets of his own country. But as this piece seems to have been the original of a new sort of poem, the Pastoral Comedy, in Italy, it cannot ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Saavedra, the contemporary of Shakspeare, Galileo, Camoens, Rubens, Tasso, and Lope de Vega, was born obscurely and in poverty, but with good antecedents. His grandfather, Juan de Cervantes, was the corregidor, or mayor, of Ossuna, and our poet was the youngest son of Rodrigo and Leonora de Cortinos, ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... these last fifteen hundred years; but that they were totally extinguished with the ancient Greek and Roman governments. Homer and Virgil could have no faults, because they were ancient; Milton and Tasso could have no merit, because they were modern. And I could almost have said, with regard to the ancients, what Cicero, very absurdly and unbecomingly for a philosopher, says with regard to Plato, 'Cum quo errare malim quam cum aliis recte sentire'. ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 'I mio saper misura Certa fosse e infallibile di quanto Pu far l'alto Fattor della natura." Tasso, Gerus, xiv. 45.] ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... I feel a little ashamed of my hero, and could wish, for the credit of my tale, it were not more necessary to invoke the historic muse of Fielding, than that of Homer or Tasso; but imperious Truth obliges me to confess, that Tallien, who is to be the subject of this letter, was first introduced to celebrity by circumstances not favourable for the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... that Odoardo and Gildippe are the names bestowed by Tasso on the English married pair who went together on the first crusade, and Gildippe continued to be my name in that circle, my nom de Parnasse, as it was called—nay, Madame de Montausieur ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Tasso, evening. Tuesday: Latin or Greek, morning; evening, theology. Wednesday, same as Monday. Friday, ditto. Thursday and Saturday, same as Tuesday. Read every day a chapter in Greek Testament, and translate ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... considerable merit. He has evidently, in his interesting biography of Tasso, undertaken a labour of love. His diligence has been great, his materials are copious and well-arranged, and his sketches of the poet's contemporaries form agreeable episodes in the narrative of ...
— Memoirs of the Court and Cabinets of George the Third, Volume 2 (of 2) - From the Original Family Documents • The Duke of Buckingham
... at all behind one. That this is really no paradox is proved by pointing to the Greeks, who, even in the time of Plato—let alone the time, whenever that was, of Homer—had not much more knowledge of books than my Italian servant, who knows a few scraps of Tasso, possesses a "Book of Dreams; or Key to the Lottery," and uses the literature I have foolishly bestowed upon him as blotters in which to keep loose bills, and wherein occasionally to do addition sums. So that the fact seems to be that reading ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... kinds of literature, Epic Poetry is the only one in which France has not obtained such success as to place her on a level with TASSO and MILTON. To make amends, her poets have followed with advantage the steps of ARIOSTO, without being able to surpass him. From this school have issued two modern epic poems: La guerre des dieux payens ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... Emily, besides being mistress of her instrument, possessed naturally a fine voice. Neither did she sing and play unrewarded; Burleigh taught her the most enchanting of all modern languages—the language of Petrarch and Tasso; and being well versed in the use of the pencil, showed her how to give to her landscapes a richer finish and a bolder effect. Then they read together; and as they looked with a smile into each other's countenances, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national Epic of Britain and is as familiar to gentle and simple, from John o' Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind, who never left ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... could be otherwise, inasmuch as my family and many people of God were sending up earnest prayers for my safe journey. My journey from Liverpool to Hull was by railroad, but at the latter place, I embarked on the S. S. Tasso of the Wilson Line bound for Tronheim, Norway. Getting into the North Sea we had a very rough voyage. We were to make our first stop at Stavanger, but the weather was so stormy as we neared the coast that evening that we did not dare to sail in the dark. Consequently we anchored out in the North ...
— Personal Experiences of S. O. Susag • S. O. Susag
... Christ's blood, is the beautiful altar by Mino da Fiesole. The church is full of old frescoes by Cosimo Rosselli, Raffaellino del Garbo, and such, and is worth a visit, if only for the work of Mino and the S. Sebastian of Leonardo del Tasso. ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple, from Land's End to John-o'-Groat's House, as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form; and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell
... dramatic poetry among them advanced abreast of the epic or lyric muse. The names of Alfieri, Metastasio, and Goldoni, demonstrate that modern Italy has successfully cultivated the dramatic as well as the epic muse; the tragedies of the first are worthy the country of Tasso, the operas of the second rival the charms of Petrarch. In the Spanish peninsula, Lope de Vega and Calderon have astonished the world by the variety and prodigality of their conceptions;[J] and fully vindicated the title of the Castilians to place their dramatic writers on a level ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... its golden fruit. Here, too, was the enchanted garden of Armida, in which that sorceress held the Christian paladin, Rinaldo, in delicious but inglorious thraldom; as is set forth in the immortal lay of Tasso. It was on this island, also, that Sycorax, the witch, held sway, when the good Prospero, and his infant daughter Miranda, were wafted to its shores. ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... depths of her knowledge of Italian nomenclature she selected a name for the child, a little girl, of course—Corrinne would do, or it might be a boy and named for his uncle Michael. In what age of the world had Michael Angelo lived? At the same time with Petrarch and Galileo, and Tasso and—did she know about any other Italians? Oh, yes. Silvio Pellico,—wasn't he in prison and didn't he write about it? And was not the leaning tower of Pisa in Italy? Was that one of the Seven Wonders of the World? And weren't there Seven Wise Men of Greece? And wasn't there a story ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... is not upon the gardeners' or the agricultural lists. One can find no farm-method in him,—indeed, little method of any sort; there is no description of a garden carrying half the details that belong to Tasso's garden of Armida, or Rousseau's in the letter of St. Preux.[E] And yet, as we read, how the country, with its woods, its valleys, its hillsides, its swains, its toiling cattle, comes swooping to our vision! The ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... promise. Going up to her, he announced his intention of kissing her. A violent squabble ensued, in which the large china dish which Leffie held in her hand was broken, two pickle jars thrown down, chairs upset, the baby scalded, and the dog Tasso's tail nearly crushed! At last Aunt Dilsey, the head cook and mother of Leffie, interposed, and seizing the soup ladle as the first thing near her, she laid about her right and left, dealing no very gentle blows at the well-oiled hair of Rondeau, who was glad to beat a retreat from the kitchen, ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... at St. Helena, that during the charge of the Cossacks at Brienne, he recognised a particular tree, under which, when a boy, he used to sit and read the Jerusalem Delivered of Tasso. The field had been, in those days, part of the exercise ground of the students, and the chateau, whence Blucher escaped so narrowly, their lodging. How strange must have been the feelings of the man who, having but yesterday planted his eagles on the ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... to him!" said Madame von Lutzow, "we will pay a visit to him as Torquato Tasso once went to the Duke di Ferrara. You, my two young friends, will please accompany us, that we may present to him two ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... superstition of the Highlands, over the Eclogues, may possibly be deemed to betray a corrupt taste, since it is an admission which is, it is believed, made for the first time. In that Ode, among a hundred other beautiful verses, the following address to Tasso has ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... he was a jovial actor and manager. I cannot marry this fact to his verse. Other admirable men have led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought; but this man, in wide contrast. Had he been less, had he reached only the common measure of great authors, of Bacon, Milton, Tasso,[652] Cervantes,[653] we might leave the fact in the twilight of human fate: but, that this man of men, he who gave to the science of mind a new and larger subject than had ever existed, and planted the standard of humanity some furlongs forward into Chaos,—that he should not be wise ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... passion to this stripling is plain. It was his meat and drink—with fighting for dessert. One of his near companions was Francisco, grandson of Fra Lippo Lippi, and another chum was Tasso, at this time a youth of nineteen—his own age. Tasso became a great artist. Vasari tells of him at length, and sketches his career while in the employ of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... through Ferrara; only stopping to change horses and dine. We snatched a moment to visit the hospital of St. Anna and the prison of Tasso—the glory and disgrace of Ferrara. Over the iron gate is written "Ingresso alia prigione di Torquato Tasso." The cell itself is miserably gloomy and wretched, and not above twelve feet square. How amply has posterity avenged ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... painted woodwork, dates from the reign of Duke Guidobaldo. All mementos of the time when Lucretia occupied the palace have disappeared; it is animated by other memories—of the subsequent court life of the Della Rovere family, when Bembo, Castiglione, and Tasso frequently were guests there. Lucretia and the suite that accompanied her could not have filled the wide rooms of the palace; her mother, Madonna Adriana, and Giulia Farnese remained with her only a short time. A young Spanish woman in her retinue, Dona Lucretia Lopez, a niece ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... two other elements, a literature, both in England, France, and Italy, in which the three elements, the saintly, the chivalrous, and the Greek heroic, have become one and undistinguishable, because all three are human, and all three divine; a literature which developed itself in Ariosto, in Tasso, in the Hypnerotomachia, the Arcadia, the Euphues, and other forms, sometimes fantastic, sometimes questionable, but which reached its perfection in our own Spenser's 'Fairy Queen'—perhaps the most admirable poem which has ever ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... up a note, told Vestris he might compose a ballet in which he would leave him his own way entirely; but that an artist whose profession only taught him to reason with his heels should not kick about works like Armida at his pleasure. 'My subject,' added Gluck, 'is taken from the immortal Tasso. My music has been logically composed, and with the ideas of my head; and, of course, there is very little room left for capering. If Tasso had thought proper to make Rinaldo a dancer he never would have ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... proving that Milton was only a plagiarist, before proving that he had acted as a forger against the memory of the most unfortunate of kings; he procured some editions of the poem of the "Sarcotis." It seemed evident that Milton had imitated some passages of it, as he had imitated Grotius and Tasso. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... canvas receptacle, the blue letter-box affixed to the opposite wall; the student with the gashed face and red cap, who lived a couple of doors further down, and always whistled the same tune; the big Newfoundland dog that stalked majestically at his side, and answered to the name of Tasso—she knew them all. These two last hours were weighted with lead. He came, sometimes a poor half-hour too soon, but usually not till past six o'clock. Never, in her life, had she waited for anyone like this, and, towards the end of the time, a sense of injury, of more ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of his country; to wander among its groves, and say, here Ovid, in lonely exile, soothed his sorrows with the melody of his heaven-inspired strain; here Petrarch wooed his much-loved Laura in sonnets soft as the affection that gave them birth; here Tasso made history and Jerusalem immortal by crowning them with the garlands of his Promethean genius; and here Ariosto, Dante, Metastasio, and a galaxy of poets and philosophers shed the splendour of their gifted imaginations on the expiring greatness of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... produced in 1777, he made another step forward. The libretto was the same as that used by Lulli nearly a hundred years before. The legend, already immortalised by Tasso, was strangely different from the classical stories which had hitherto inspired his greatest works. The opening scene strikes the note of romanticism which echoes through the whole opera. Armida, a princess deeply versed in magic arts, laments ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Tasso, vii. 76: When first on trees bourgeon the blossoms soft;" and Tennyson, In ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott |
