They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died:
The mountain-village where his latter days

Went down the vale of years; and 't is their pride —
An honest pride, and let it be their praise
To offer to the passing stranger's gaze
His mansion and his sepulchre; both plain
And venerably simple, such as raise

A feeling more accordant with his strain,
Than if a pyramid formed his monumental fane.

And the soft quiet hamlet where he dwelt
Is one of that complexion which seems made
For those who their mortality have felt,
And sought a refuge from their hopes decayed
In the deep umbrage of a green hill's shade,
Which shows a distant prospect far away
Of busy cities, now in vain displayed,
For they can lure no further; and the ray
Of a bright sun can make sufficient holiday,

Developing the mountains, leaves, and flowers,
And shining in the brawling brook, whereby,
Clear as its current, glide the sauntering hours
With a calm languor, which, though to the eye
Idlesse it seem, hath its morality.

If from society we learn to live,

'Tis solitude should teach us how to die.

TASSO.

THE noble Torquato Tasso, fearing that his father would be displeased if he stole time from his legal studies, hurried into seclusion, and, secretly devoting all his leisure hours to the muse, produced his brilliant poem of Rinaldo before he was eighteen years old. His fervid fancy, fondness for study, exquisite sensibility, and intense desire of popular love and fame, while they made him keenly crave society and friendship, compelled him to know much solitude. His enemies, envious critics, dictatorial patrons, and literary censors, persecuted him with endless vexations of the most exasperating sort, bitterly attacking his style, insisting on the omission of what he felt to be the best passages of his poems, and circulating grossly altered and mutilated editions of them in spite of all his protestations. Escaping from the annoy

ances and unappreciation he suffered at Ferrara, he wandered for several years from city to city, "the finest genius of his time, a prey to sorrow and disease, his splendid fancy darkened by distress, his noble heart devoured at once by the agony of hopeless love and the ambition of literary glory." When he returned to the court of Alphonso, expecting affectionate welcome and honor, he was met with rude neglect. Insulted and derided, he gave vent to his indignation in such terms as caused the Duke to have him put under guard in an asylum for paupers and madmen. The misery of such a spirit, so tender and so proud, so surpassingly alive to the breath of human opinion, when subjected to the foul injustice and severity with which the haughty heartlessness of his master here pursued him, can hardly be conceived by ordinary minds. His own descriptions of it are indescribably touching.

There is no solitude on earth so deep

As that where man decrees that man shall weep.

He writes to his dear friend Gonzaga, "The fear of being perpetually imprisoned here increases my melancholy, and the squalor of my beard, my hair, and habit, exceedingly annoys me. But, above all, I am afflicted by solitude, which even in my best state was often so tormenting that I have gone in search of company at the most unseasonable hours." Incarcerated for seven long and cruel years, his loneliness was so great that his disturbed mind created for itself the belief that a familiar Spirit was in the constant habit of coming to hold high and kind communion with him.

All the historians of Tasso agree in eulogizing "his candor, his fidelity to his word, his courtesy, his frankness, his freedom from the least tincture of revenge or of malignity, his attachment to his friends, his gratitude to his benefactors, his patience in misfortune, his mildness and sobriety, his purity of life and manners, his sincere piety. None of his foes seem to have been able to charge him justly with a single moral stain." He was extremely sensitive to slights, exacting of the respect due to him. This was his single ungracious quality. Few things are

more cruel than that so highly loving and gifted a soul should have had such numerous and rancorous enemies that his life was embittered and burdened by them until he was quite weaned from it. When a guest of Rome, lodged in the Vatican, waiting to be crowned with laurel,

-the first poet so honored since Petrarch,―he sighed to flee away and be at rest. Growing very ill, he obtained permission to retire to the Monastery of Saint Onofrio. When the physician informed him that his last hour was near, he embraced him, expressed his gratitude for so sweet an announcement, and then, lifting his eyes, thanked God that after so tempestuous a life he was now brought to a calm haven. The Pope having granted the dying poet a plenary indulgence, he said, "This is the chariot on which I hope to go crowned, not with laurel as a poet into the capitol, but with glory as a saint into heaven."

BRUNO.

GIORDANO BRUNO, an exceedingly brave, sensitive, loving soul, for these very qualities, which in more favorable conditions of society would have blessed him with dear comrades and popular admiration, was made an outcast and an exile. Intensely desirous of wisdom and nobleness, unflinchingly loyal to reality, detesting falsehood and indifference, a burning worshipper of truth and freedom, in an age of despotism and conformity he was naturally considered dangerous, and was put under ban. Lonely in his loftiness of unterrified thought, hunted from nation to nation, with brief respites, unfriended, save by a few generous exceptions like Fulke Greville and Sir Philip Sidney, the integrity of his own soul was his unquenchable comfort, and the presence of the Infinite Spirit of Eternal Verity was his inseparable companionship.

The tonic of his veracious health and cheer is breathed in the words he speaks: "To have sought, found, and laid open a form of Truth, be that my commendation, even though none understand. If, with Nature, and under God, I be wise, that surely is more than enough."

Imprisoned, mercilessly tortured, kept for over two years from the sight of all human faces save hostile and mocking ones, with divine resolution refusing to deny a thought or recant a word, he was at last burned at the stake. In some lines of his own, written with prophetic anticipation of this very end, he says, "Open, open the way! Ye dense multitude, spare this sightless, speechless face all harsh obstructions, while the toil-worn, sunken form goes knocking at the gates of less painful but deeper death!" Genius often brings with it into the world a feeling of melancholy strangeness, if not of estrangement, a mysterious homesickness of soul. It feels itself a foreigner on the earth. The features of Bruno - in the portrait transmitted to our times are affectingly expressive of this. He looks like one whose affections had been repulsed by an unworthy world, and whose soul had found strength by divinely rallying itself upon God. As we gaze on his strong, sad, lonely lineaments we are reminded of what he himself says in one of his sonnets: "You may read the story of my life written in my face."

VICO.

VICO, the great founder of the science of history, was one of the loneliest minds of his century. A more profound or original thinker has rarely appeared. While yet young he became tutor to the nephews of the Bishop of Ischia, where he spent nine years in the lonely solitude of Vatolla, dividing his thoughts between poetry, philosophy, and jurisprudence. His chosen comrades, besides the great Roman jurisconsults, were Plato and Dante, with the last of whom his ardent and melancholy genius closely allied him. But even such mental companionship was more frequently deserted for the pursuit of his own absorbing reflections.

He saw that the history of mankind was no medley or phantasmagoria, at the mercy of individual leaders, but a grand march of humanity, a total evolution of humanity, governed by great laws and reducible to a science. He

trod the lonely path of this discovery with unwearied patience, every day rising higher in unknown regions, meeting no rival or companion, leaving his fellow-beings below him as fast as he mounted, until at last, turning round on the summit, and seating himself, he saw, spread out far beneath his feet, all mankind and their history in one view. "Unhappily," said Michelet, "he found himself quite alone. No one could understand him. He was equally isolated by the originality of his ideas and by the strangeness of his speech. The opposite of that which happened to the Seven Sleepers befell him. He had forgotten the language of the past and could speak only that of the future, a language then too early and now too late, so that for this grand and unfortunate genius the time has never come.

He gave surprising examples of the vigor of his comprehensive and penetrating intellect by originating the doctrine of myths, which, in its application to history, has since proved so fruitful in valuable results; also in first propounding, with as much precision and thoroughness as it has since received, the profound truth that the record of much of the pre-historic experience of mankind is locked up in the etymological structure of language. It is only just now, in our own generation, that, in the hands of the gifted masters of the science of comparative philology, this deep discovery is amazing the world with its brilliant revelations, forcing from the dark matrix of each primitive word some crystallized secret of the forgotten life of the human race.

Vico has written his own life; and it is piteous to read the account of the painful isolation in which he was left by the careless and the envious. His rivals, chagrined by his vast superiority, treated him with cruel injustice. Some called him insane, others an obscure and paradoxical genius. He was traduced, satirized, pursued with ironical eulogies. He says, "Vico blessed these adversities which ever drew him back to his studies. Retired in his solitude, as in an impregnable fortress, he thought, he wrote, he took a noble vengeance on his detractors. There he found the new science. From that moment he believed