r, history, or geography,
which may make his people real; they are not, as with Spenser, elves and
wizards flitting about in a nameless fairyland, characterless and
passionless; they are historical creatures, captains and soldiers in a
country mapped out by the geographer; but they are phantoms all the more
melancholy, these beautiful and heroic Clorindas and Erminias and
Tancreds and Godfreys--why? because the real world around Tasso is
peopled with Brachianos and Corombonas, and Annabellas and Giovannis,
creatures for Webster and Ford; and because this world of chivalry is,
in his Italy, as false as the world of Amadis and Esplandian in Toboso
and Barcelona for poor Don Quixote. Melancholy therefore, and dreamy,
both Tasso and Spenser, with nothing they can fully love in reality,
because they see it tainted with reality and evil; without the cheerful
falling back upon everyday life of Ariosto and Shakespeare, and with a
strange fancy for fairyland, for the distant, for the Happy Islands, the
St. Brandan's Isles, the country of the fountain of youth, the country
of which vague reports have come back with the ships of Raleigh and
Ponce de Leon. Tasso and Spenser are happiest, in their calm, melancholy
way, when they can let themselves go in day-dreams, and talk of things
in which they do not believe, of diamond shields which stun monsters of
ointments which cure all ills of body and of soul of enchanted groves
whose trees sound with voices, and lutes, of boats in which, steered by
fairies, we can glide across the scarcely rippled summer sea, and
watching the ruins of the past, time and reality left behind, set sail
for some strange land of bliss. And there is in the very sensuousness
and love of beauty-of these men a vagueness and melancholy, a constant:
sense of the fleeting and of the eternal, as in that passage, translated
from the languidly sweet Italian perfection of Tasso into the timid,
almost scentless, English of Spenser--"Cosi trapassa al trapassar d'un
giorno."

So passeth, in the passing of a day,

Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre

No more doth florish after first decay,
That earst was sought to deck both bed and bowre
Of many a lady, and many a Paramowre.
Gather therefore the Rose whilest yet is prime,
For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre;
Gather the Rose of love whitest yet is time,
Whitest loving thou mayest loved be withe equall