le spera
Vincer popoli invitti e schiere armate."
Canto iv. st. 27.]

[Footnote 3:

"That sweet grove
Of Daphne by Orontes."
_Parad. Lost_, b. iv.

It was famous for the most luxurious worship of antiquity. Vide Gibbon,
vol. iii. p. 198.]

[Footnote 4: I omit a point about "fires" of love, and "ices" of the
heart; and I will here observe, once for all, that I omit many such in
these versions of Tasso, for the reason given in the Preface.]

[Footnote 5: In the original, an impetuous gust of wind carries away the
sword of Tancred; a circumstance which I mention because Collins admired
it (see his Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands). I confess I
cannot do so. It seems to me quite superfluous; and when the reader
finds the sword conveniently lying for the hero outside the wood, as he
returns, the effect is childish and pantomimic. If the magician wished
him not to fight any more, why should he give him the sword back? And if
it was meant as a present to him from Clorinda, what gave her the
power to make the present? Tasso retained both the particulars in the
_Gerusalemme Conquistata_.]

[Footnote 6:

"Giace l'alta Cartago: appena i segni
De l'alte sue ruine il lido serba.

Muoiono le citta: muoiono i regni:
Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba:
E l'uom d'esser mortal par che si sdegni.
Oh nostra mente cupida e superba!"

Canto xv. st. 20.

Great Carthage is laid low. Scarcely can eye
Trace where she stood with all her mighty crowd
For cities die; kingdoms and nations die;
A little sand and grass is all their shroud;
Yet mortal man disdains mortality!
O mind of ours, inordinate and proud!

Very fine is this stanza of Tasso; and yet, like some of the finest
writing of Gray, it is scarcely more than a cento. The commentators call
it a "beautiful imitation" of a passage in Sannazzaro; and it is; but the
passage in Sannazzaro is also beautiful. It contains not only the "Giace
Cartago," and the "appena i segni," &c., but the contrast of the pride
with the mortality of man, and, above all, the "dying" of the cities,
which is the finest thing in the stanza of its imitator.

"Qua devictae Carthaginis arces
Procubuere, jacentque infausto in littore turres
Eversae; quantum ille metus, quantum illa laborum
Urbs dedit insultans Latio et Laurentibus arvis!