New-York daily tribune. [volume] (New-York [N.Y.]) 1842-1866, 1842-08-27


TAsso's PRIsos.-The cell is indescribably vile,
and wants all the elements even of n picturesque
dungeon It is dust.hoe under mad house
its walls like those of any other for rats
spiders, are 5lackened and defaced; yet des-
perate English carbonari have charcoaled here
as every where else where the pencil would not
work-smoked their accomplished names, and
compelled the door TO feel many sharp stietto
nibbing at its panels for the same noble purpose.
Were it not for that tablet of marble inserted into
the front wall to announce that this is no vulgar
dungeon, you would pass on but with that in
formation what thoughts arise! If we love to
think that the Rhspsodst Of the Had, that Prince
of Trouoadours, recited, amidst appauding Greece,
the deeds Of his heroes under his countrys plane
trees, or on the shores of tho hoarse Egean if we
are glad to know that Virgil had his knife and fork
at the tables of Augustus and Mecenas, what pain
to reoollect that Tasso modulated the exquisite
stanzas of his not less immortal epic (worthy to
be sung to the harp of Ossian at the banquet of all
the princes of the earth) amidst the humiliation
and dependency Of dungeon What fools men
are to endure despots They bring light and
they bring key; bars there are none, nor bolts
The prisoner has been gone fer four centuries !;
oxygen has entirely eaten up the old iron lock;
time has reduced to dust the hand that applied
the key; the dukes brow is still contracted. but
it is only in the discolored marble of his tomb;
and the despot (and there is nothing in Italy but
despotism) who made men quail and cover at his
presence, is disarticuated and unsightly skele-
ton, This is one of the places where is COM
PEELED to feel in its full truth the "quantua stint
hominum corpuscula.'' AS to the Imprisonment
Of any thing human in such place, how any man
could have borne it month, and have lived to
come out again. is our marvel "a hero COM
mon criminal would have died surely; no prose
existence could have stood it la nightingale trets
himself to death in a cage, even though he be not
shut up with toys and mockbirds, but the creative
mind of tho poet makes, to certain extent, its
own place every where; and though it could not
fabricate heaven out of such hell, even to a
Tasso, it did not prevent him from carrying the
prodigious resources of his mind into moods Of
being far, far beyond his prison-bars. The door
opens to the gentlest pressure, and the light of
day, with the vordure of a small garden one
spot, make more emphatic the silence of the un-
windowed cell. In Tasso's time there was a smalli
window, very small one; it Is walled up, but the
marks of It's dimensions are visible in the old brick
work; and we see that, standing by it, he might,
by straining ittlc, and standing sideways, behold
few inches of the blue sky the gablc-ends of
his ,yrants palace In one corner of his square
area of twelve feet was his pallet, and here he
mast have SAT, if, indeed, he, like Ariosto, had a
chair to sit on While we are thus curioesly and
intently surveying for few minutes every foo,
of the small cell. our guide points to where Byron
sat nearly the whole day Illuminating, and without
light till he had remotely felt the kind Of Suffering
which brother poet had SO long borne in sileaceE
TBlackwoed for August.