murmurs.  Heaven was above him, and the world beneath.  The memory of his wrongs and his ambitions alike vanished in the shadow cast before by his approaching death.  Alfonso and Ferrara faded away upon the horizon of eternity; even the fame of his Gerusalemme, the great object for which he had lived, had become utterly indifferent to him.  In the monastery of St. Onofrio, a bent, sorrow-stricken man, old before his time, joining with the monks in the duties of religion, Tasso appeals more powerfully to our feelings than when in the full flush of youth and happiness he shone the brightest star in the royal court of Alfonso.

Awakening to the sense of the great loss that Italy was about to sustain in his death, his friends and admirers proposed that the Pope should confer upon him at the Capitol the laurel wreath that had crowned the brow of Petrarch.  But the weather during the winter proved singularly unpropitious for such a ceremony.  Rain fell almost every day, and constant sirocco winds depressed the spirits of the people and prevented all outdoor enjoyments.  And thus the season wore on till April dawned with the promise of brighter skies, and the day was fixed, and all the elite of Rome and of the chief cities of Italy were invited to attend the coronation.  Extensive preparations were made; the whole city was in a flutter of excitement, and the people looked forward to a holiday such as Rome had not seen since the days of the Caesars.  But by this time the poet was dying, fever-wasted, in his lonely cell.  He could see from his window, as he lay propped up with pillows on his narrow couch, across the river and its broad valley crowded with houses, the slender campanile of Michael Angelo ascending from the Capitoline Hill, marking the spot where at the moment the people were busy preparing for the magnificent ceremony of the morrow.  But not for him was the triumph; it came too late.  “Tomorrow,” he said, “I shall be beyond the reach of all earthly honour.”  He received the last rites of the Church from the hands of the diocesan, and passed quietly away with the unfinished sentence upon his lips, “Into thy hands, O Lord,” while the concluding strains of the vesper hymn were chanted by the monks.  And they who came on the morrow, to summon him to his coronation, found him in the sleep of death.  The laurel wreath that was meant for his brow was laid upon his coffin, as it was carried on the very day of his intended coronation, with great pomp, cardinals and princes bearing up the pall, and deposited in the neighbouring church of the monastery.  Ever since, the anniversary of his death has been religiously kept by the monks of St. Onofrio.  They throw open on that day, the 25th of April, the monastery and garden to the general public; ladies are freely admitted, and a festival is observed, during which portions of the poet’s writings are read, his relics exhibited, and his tomb wreathed with flowers.