In room or bedroom, all have tongues and speech,
And are for ever tattling.  Idle Babble
Is always going about, playing the child;
And should a dumb man enter in that place,
The dumb would babble in his own despite. 
And yet this evil is the least of all
That might assail thee.  Thou might’st be arrested
In fearful transformation to a willow,
A beast, fire, water,—­fire for ever sighing,
Water for ever weeping.”—­Here he ceased: 
And I, with all this fine foreknowledge, went
To the great city; and, by Heaven’s kind will,
Came where they live so happily.  The first sound
I heard was a delightful harmony,
Which issued forth, of voices loud and sweet;—­Sirens,
and swans, and nymphs, a heavenly noise
Of heavenly things;—­which gave me such delight,
That, all admiring, and amazed, and joyed,
I stopped awhile quite motionless.  There stood
Within the entrance, as if keeping guard
Of those fine things, one of a high-souled aspect,
Stalwart withal, of whom I was in doubt

  Whether to think him better knight or leader.[8]
  He, with a look at once benign and grave,
  In royal guise, invited me within;
  He, great and in esteem; me, lorn and lowly. 
  Oh, the sensations and the sights which then
  Shower’d on me!  Goddesses I saw, and nymphs
  Graceful and beautiful, and harpers fine
  As Linus or as Orpheus; and more deities,
  All without veil or cloud, bright as the virgin
  Aurora, when she glads immortal eyes,
  And sows her beams and dew-drops, silver and gold.

In the summer of 1574, the Duke of Ferrara went to Venice to pay his respects to the successor of Charles the Ninth, Henry the Third, then on his way to France from his kingdom of Poland.  Tasso went with the duke, and is understood to have taken the opportunity of looking for a printer of his Jerusalem, which was now almost finished.  Writers were anxious to publish in that crafty city, because its government would give no security of profit to books printed elsewhere.  Alfonso, who was in mourning for Henry’s brother, and to whom mourning itself only suggested a new occasion of pomp and vanity, took with him to this interview five hundred Ferrarese gentlemen, all dressed in long black cloaks; who walking about Venice (says a reporter) “by twos and threes,” wonderfully impressed the inhabitants with their “gravity and magnificence."[9] The mourners feasted, however; and Tasso had a quartan fever, which delayed the completion of the Jerusalem till next year.  This was at length effected; and now once more, it might have been thought, that the writer would have reposed on his laurels.