grief as he openly expressed in the letter to Amerigo Sanseverino.[7] Is it possible, then, thought Torquato, that the mother from whose tender kisses and streaming tears I was severed but one year ago,[8] has died of poison—­poisoned by my uncles?  Sinking into the consciousness of a child so sensitive by nature and so early toned to sadness, this terrible suspicion of a secret death by poison incorporated itself with the very essence of his melancholy humor, and lurked within him to flash forth in madness at a future period of life.  That he was well acquainted with the doleful situation of his family is proved by his first extant letter.  Addressed to the noble lady Vittoria Colonna on behalf of Bernardo and his sister, this is a remarkable composition for a boy of twelve.[9] His poor father, he says, is on the point of dying of despair, oppressed by the malignity of fortune and the rapacity of impious men.  His uncle is bent on marrying Cornelia to some needy gentleman, in order to secure her mother’s estate for himself.  ’The grief, illustrious lady, of the loss of property is great, but that of blood is crushing.  This poor old man has naught but my sister and myself; and now that fortune has deprived him of wealth and of the wife he loved like his own soul, he cannot bear that that man’s avarice should rob him of his beloved daughter, with whom he hoped to end in rest these last years of his failing age.  In Naples we have no friends; for my father’s disaster makes every one shy of us:  our relatives are our enemies.  Cornelia is kept in the house of my uncle’s kinsman Giangiacopo Coscia, where no one is allowed to speak to her or give her letters.’

[Footnote 7:  Dated February 13, 1556.]

[Footnote 8:  See Opere, vol. iv. p. 100, for Tasso’s description of the farewell to his mother, which he remembered deeply, even in later life.]

[Footnote 9:  Lettere, vol. i. p. 6.]

In the midst of these afflictions, which already tuned the future poet’s utterance to a note of plaintive pathos and ingenuous appeal for aid, Torquato’s studies were continued on a sounder plan and in a healthier spirit than at Naples.  The perennial consolation of his troubled life, that delight in literature which made him able to anticipate the lines of Goethe—­

    That naught belongs to me I know,
    Save thoughts that never cease to flow
      From founts that cannot perish,
    And every fleeting shape of bliss
    Which kindly fortune lets me kiss,
      Or in my bosom cherish—­

now became the source of an inner brightness which not even the ‘malignity of fortune,’ the ‘impiety of men,’ the tragedy of his mother’s death, the imprisonment of his sister, and the ever-present sorrow of his father, ’the poor gentleman fallen into misery and misfortune through no fault of his own,’ could wholly overcloud.  The boy had been accustomed in Naples to the applause of his teachers