Among the manuscripts of the British Museum are preserved some of these writings, whose withered vellum pages we turn over with profound pity, as we think of the sad circumstances in which they were composed.  The most valuable of these is the manuscript of the Torrismondo, in Tasso’s own handwriting, and in the original parchment binding.  This work was begun before his imprisonment, and it was not finished until the year after his liberation; but the greater part of it was composed in the wretchedness of his cell at Ferrara.  The story upon which it is founded is a very harrowing one, a king of the Ostrogoths marrying his own sister, mistaking her for a foreign princess; but it is treated with very inadequate tragic power, and, like the Aminta, displays no real action.  Its beauty chiefly consists in its choral odes on the vanity of all earthly things, which are exquisitely sad and touching.  We hear in them the wild wail of the poet over his own misfortunes, and the vanishing of the dreams of glory which haloed his life.  The chorus with which the tragedy winds up—­“Ahi! lagrime; Ahi! dolore”—­the words appropriately carved upon his tombstone at St. Onofrio—­is unspeakably pathetic.  It is his own dirge, the cry of a heart whose strings are about to break.  It is as untranslatable as the sigh of the wind in a pine forest.  If the words are changed, the spell is lost, and the way to the heart is missed.

At last the solicitations of the most powerful princes of Italy on Tasso’s behalf overcame the tenacity of Alfonso’s will, and the victim was released; but not till he had become so weak and ill that, if the imprisonment had continued a little longer, death would inevitably have opened the door for him.  When the order for his liberation had been obtained, his friends made known to him by slow degrees the glad tidings, lest a too sudden shock should prove fatal.  He was now free to go wherever he pleased, and to behold the beauties of Nature, which had been the mirage of his prison dreams; but the elasticity of his spirits was gone for ever; the bow had been too long bent to recover its original spring, and the memory of his sufferings haunted him continually, and cast a dark shadow over everything.  He could not altogether shake off the fear that he was still in Alfonso’s power, and wherever he went he fancied that an officer was in pursuit of him to drag him back to the foul prison in St. Anne’s.  A modern Italian poet, Aleardo Aleardi, has graphically described the feelings of the gentle poet-knight, roaming, pale and dishevelled, as a mendicant from door to door.  But the sufferings that had thus maimed him bodily and mentally had spiritually ennobled him; and there is not a more touching incident in all history than his entreaty to be allowed to kiss the hand of the cruel tyrant, as a last favour before leaving Ferrara for ever, in token of his gratitude for the benefits conferred upon him in happier days,—­a favour which Alfonso, to his eternal disgrace, refused to grant.