his anticipation of recovering his property was disappointed. Here he was invited by a friend to pass the season in a castle at Bivaccio on the Abruzzi Hills, an old feudal erection, surrounded by woods, and enlivened by the euphonious fluency of its improvisatori. Amusements suiting his tastes were here abundant; but there was no quiet in his heart, and he returned to Naples, and then in poverty to Rome, and next in beggary to the convent of Santa Maria Nuova, where charity supported this mighty bard of Sorrento. Well might Niccola Villani upbraid with bitter satire the age that allowed such a poet as Tasso, in such a country as Italy, to hide himself from the shame of public mendicancy among the destitute sick : "Oh Italy! He had not whence, or coat or loaf to buy, In common wards midst pauper-sick he lay; Or stood with vagrants by the public way, In rags and tatters, penniless and poor; And all but begged at every church's door." This was the last ebb of his fortune. From that time it gradually rose, though never to prosperity. The Tuscan prince sent him a gift; he was invited to Florence and Mantua; and though the malignity of the Ferraran tyrant, Alfonso, continued to pursue him, he went half happily to the Florentine capital, where the Duke, his consort, all the Medici, all the academies, except the envious Della Crusca, -all the men of letters, and nearly the whole population came forth to welcome him. Honour poured from every palace, and from every humble hearth -a new illustration of the strange vicissitudes of this poet's career. Now adulated by the wearers of crowns,now spit upon as a maniac, now caressed by all the beauty of Italy, now thrust behind iron bars into a dungeon, once exalted to the splendours of a Roman victor, and then driven hungry and naked into an asylum of the poor:--how varied was his career-how inconstant the fortune that attended him! And now he was the cynosure of a triumphal show; but the restlessness so remarkable in him since his imprisonment kept him wandering still. Between Rome, and Naples, and Florence, he was continually moving. His lyrics, meanwhile, flowed perennially from an imagination more exuberant than ever, though matured from the sparkling silver of his early lays to a sober tinge of gold. Sometimes amid the treasures of the Vatican in Rome,-sometimes near the scenes of his youth, time glided away; and now a devout, melancholy, feeble man of fifty-one, he saw the richest crown of poetic fame descending on his head. It was decreed that he should be honoured by the Coronation of the Laurel in the capitol of Rome. Petrarca had so been glorified; but Barabello, the fantastic poetaster to Leo X., had been also selected to wear such a trophy. Tasso, too, felt that he was dying, and was disinclined to make another sacrifice to vanity. Every poet in Italy, nevertheless, was composing an ode of gratulation; the streets of Rome were prepared; the marbles of the Capitol were adorned, and throngs from every province crowded to witness the triumph of the minstrel they loved. But Torquato desired rather to sit peacefully under his oak in the garden of St. Onofrio than to form a spectacle for the populace of Rome. His mind was now calmed to a placid repose; ambition had gone, and contented piety occupied its place. He could now live in independence, for the favour of the world was rising on him; his only wish was for the serenity of an old age passed in perfecting unfinished works, and bequeathing the last fruits of his genius to the children of the generation which surrounded him. Still the Romans would not be disappointed of their pomp, and all the preparations were made for crowning Tasso in the Capitol. But he had felt a prophetic foreboding of his death. He had eaten some sweet cakes, and illness now came rapidly upon him. Retiring into the convent of Saint Onofrio, he wrote a farewell to his friends; and on the 10th of April, 1595, his malady became so severe that the physicians gave him up. An universal gloom spread around with this announcement. He was borne to a chapel, and piously received the sacrament. Hence he was carried to his bed in the arms of the brethren. They asked him about his will, and he said none was needed; about his monument, and he answered-a simple tablet to cover his grave. Then giving some last directions, he pressed a cru cifix to his bosom, and subsided into a cair pectancy of death, in which he remained half slumbering during seven days. At last, on the 25th of April, having consoled himself with every religious rite, he sang a hymn until his breath failed, and then once more embracing the cross, repeated the words, "In manus tuas, Domine ;"—but before the sentence could be ended the thread was cut, and a good and a great man past from the earth. The honours intended for his life were in other forms lavished on his remains, and these were afterwards privately laid at evening in the church of Saint Onofrio. No monument or inscription was then dedicated to his memory, but a few years afterwards a white marble slab was placed over the spot, and again at a later period a stately memorial was blazoned with a splendid record of his worth. Medals of him were struck; a colossal statue, crowned with laurel, was raised at Bergamo, and another at Padua, while his lineaments were cut on gems and cameos, which preserved for ages the similitude of his manly and poetical beauty. Faults Tasso had-vanity, pride, susceptibility of offence, deep passions, and addiction to vain reveries; but he was pious, noble, capable of heroic friendship, forgiving, and full of the more magnanimous instincts of our nature. His virtues, in the end, conquered his failings. Torquato Tasso, therefore, as he was in Italy the delight of his own age, may well be for her the glory of every other. JOHANNES RONGE. JOHANNES RONGE is a name which the last few years have made well known to the world. He is recognized as the leader of the new Catholic party of Germany, and the companion of those who desire to wed free thought in religion to free action in political matters. Bred amid the dim traditions of the Roman Church, and nurtured and educated in the midst of serfs, his is a mind which has struggled free from the winding shroud of old superstitions, and cast off the grave-clothes of passive obedience to those who claim a divine right to do wrong; and when Europe lately heaved with those convulsions which threatened to shake the foundations upon which the throne of the despotic ruler, and the altar of the priest who assumes to be infallible, have been placed, Ronge came forth with his free mind—his earnest enthusiasm-his powerful intellect and his burning eloquence to bring order to a society lapsing into chaos, and to preach a faith such as free men might live by and die for. That Ronge dared to do this in Austria is a sufficient guarantee that he was exposed to persecution. The rulers, spiritual and temporal, who owe their power to the ignorance and degradation of the people, would have been false to their own policy and themselves, if they had left such a man free to shed his clear calm light amid the surrounding darkness-to speak out from the depths of his heart the dictates of his private judgment to teach men that they have souls which must be saved by themselves, and not vicariously by the orisons of a priest, and to show them that if they would make themselves fit for the world to come, they must make the world that is fit for them. Such a man was the most dangerous of revolutionists,-far more to be dreaded than they who preached unmitigated physical force, and looked to the sword alone for emancipation. He brought heart, faith, enthusiasm, brain, as well as power to the task; and not only invested liberty with the appearance of temporal desirability, but threw around it the halo of sanctity. Had Ronge been suffered to continue his labours, his followers might have been to the Emperor of Austria and his armies what the Ironsides of Cromwell, who prayed and fought with equal fervour, were to the cavaliers of Charles I.; but fate has registered in its inscrutable degrees another destiny and a different mission for Ronge. The tide of agitation and revolt which had flowed over Europe, bearing with it new ideas and new motives of action-which dashed peoples against kings till the rule of the few seemed on the verge of annihilation, subsided almost as quickly as it came, but subsided like the waters of the Nile, leaving a soil prolific in thought for a coming generation. The array of the roused multitudes was scattered to the winds, and their voice hushed at the bidding of power as a gale might be at the wave of the magician's wand. The land became a camp, and soldiers, drawn from the most barbarous of the Austrian provinces, at once the makers and administrators of the law-judges and executioners. Free thought was prohibited-private opinion made a crime. Men were thenceforth to think by square and plumb-line. Free words were not to be spoken, and action, bearing the semblance of freedom, was put down by the fire of a platoon. Such was not the atmosphere in which a man like Ronge could exist. He could not still the beatings of his heart, nor chain up the eloquent tongue, on the accents of which thousands hung entranced. He could not obey human authority when he felt that it was opposed to Divine law. Like most men who play a prominent part on the stage of life, and mould the form of the future, he felt he had that to do which he was bidden to perform by a higher power than an earthly monarch. Rightly or wrongly, he was permeated by that enthusiasm which is evinced by those who believe their errand is from on high, and who, despising mere man-made law, contemn prohibition, and brave danger with that determination and devotedness which spring from the innate sense of a sacred duty to be performed. Thus influenced Ronge persevered, and the result is, that he is in England a proscribed outlaw. It is the glory of England that her soil is the only one in Europe upon which the persecuted is safe, and the outcast may find a home. It is not only her glory, but one of the sources of her power-one of the springs of the freedom she enjoys. We are a composite race, made up of almost every nation upon the face of the earth. The races of Europe are continually mingling their blood with ours, and they send us as their representatives their wisest, their bravest, and their best. The grovelling, the timid, the mean, and the stupid, who can bend their patient necks beneath the heaviest yoke of serfdom, and bow to superstitions as gross as those of paganism may stay at home in peace. They are the fit instruments of tyranny; but those who are wise enough to frown down the dogmas which enchain the soul,-free enough to pant for liberty of action, and brave enough to speak out what they think, and try to translate it into the practical language of effort, are too dangerous to be tolerated in the land of their birth, from which, escaping with bare life, they fly to the island-home of liberty, there to mingle their free thoughts with those of a nation of freemen, and send back into the night from which they have emerged some rays of light which may yet kindle into the full glare of noonday. Johannes Ronge is one of these high spirits whose career, unfinished as it is, we would not have unchronicled; and we have the satisfaction of knowing that although our words may fall short of the nobility of the theme, they will at least have the merit of correctness, as they are founded upon the relation which we had from Ronge himself, and upon the materials which he placed at our disposal. Johannes Ronge was born at the village of Bischofswalde, in the midst of the mountains of Silesia. The hour of his birth was contemporaneous with the famous battle of Leipsig, on the 16th of October, 1813. Many years after this event the directing elders of his church at Breslau, on presenting him a letter of congratulation on his birthday, referring to this coincidence, said:"The hot fight, the cannonthunder which roused the world in the hour of your birth, when national independence only was won, not yet the inner freedom of nations-when the fate of princes was decided this cannon-thunder must have entered deep into your new-born heart; and have been the God-child's gift prophetic of your great career." Getting away from cannon-roarings and swaddling clothes, young Johannes employed his early years, ranging from the sixth to the twelfth, in easy service on his father's farm, keeping the sheep to wit. In a school belonging to the village he learned to read, write, and cipher; he got the catechism by heart, and bible history, whilst engaged in his bucolic duties; geography and the history of Silesia he learned during his last year at school. In the year 1827, his father was persuaded to send him to the Gymnasium at Niessen, and here he remained at study till 1836. Ronge adopted the clerical profession, as harmonizing most com honour. Courtiers envied and flattered him, women caressed and loved him, and the Lombard noble whom he served reserved for him conspicuous marks of favour. Claiming a descent from some Trojan source, the pride of the prince of Este was in giving hospitality to poets. Ariosto had been entertained in his grandfather's court, and Tasso was now an ornament of his. Both had cause rather to repent than to rejoice in this distinction, the one in his wild exile in Garfagnana, the other in that sorrow which sinks every inferior pain into oblivion. Ferrara then eclipsed in splendour every capital of Italy except the Florentine ; and when its prince declared a marriage about to take place between himself and Barbara of Austria, a blaze of magnificence broke out among its palaces. Chivalric manners were then indeed expiring, but they lingered still in those southern cities, and pageants became more stately towards the end of the period in which they rose. Gilded casques and dancing plumes, housings of velvet and gold, mythological allegories, personifications of the Muses and of Venus, of Apollo and the Graces, mingled in barbaric beauty with the works of purer taste and more poetical imagination. Every honour that could be invented was prepared for the bride; and on the nuptial morning there was gathered in the streets and piazzas of Ferrara a throng as gorgeous as any that ever welcomed under triumphal arch the fair Palmyran queen. The festal throng halted without the city at the beautiful palace and garden of the duke in Belvedere isle. Innumerable barques sprinkled the river, glittering with cloth of gold, crimson awnings and linings, and crews in gaudy costume. The population was gathered to witness the scene, and when the bride entered Ferrara, a series of festivities began; tournaments and banquets, drowning all the inhabitants in a delirium of delight. In the midst of these rejoicings news came of the death of Pope Pius IV. Fasso's patron hastened to Rome, and he himself remained with the newly wedded prince, Alfonso. Alfonso had three sisters; the eldest, Anna, wife of Francis, Duke of Guise; the second Lucrezia, still unmarried, though thirty-one years old and the third Leonora. Lucrezia was the first to notice the young poet introduced into her brother's court, and to her he addressed many verses; but Tasso, who admired Leonora's portrait before he saw herself, no sooner beheld this third Grace of the house of Este, than he felt a passion which was the torture of his, and should have been the remorse of his persecutors' days. On that first hour he says that "the beautiful serene of her countenance met my eyes, and I beheld love walking there : had reverence and wonder not petrified my heart, I had perished by a double death." Crowned as these sisters had been by poetic garlands from a thousand pens, never had they received the tribute of such a poet as Tasso. They admired him for his sonnets and canzones; they welcomed him to the princely table; they listened with marvelling delight to his songs, and whenever they were ill or melancholy, they turned to him for cheer. Meanwhile, he continued to write his epic, and published a number of poems in a volume produced by the "Ethereals" in combination. He also wrote various dialogues and orations, and making excursions to see his old companions at Padua, and his father at Mantua, saw a grove of laurels thickening richly around his head. Returning to Ferrara, he revealed in some touching lyrics the reminiscence of a first and fruitless love with a young Mantuan girl, to whom he alludes as another Laura, and whom he ever remembered with tenderness if not regret. At Alfonso's court, however, his fancy and his affection were all engaged,--one by Leonora, the other by poetry, and of poetry he gave a public display in the Academy of Ferrara, where there was held an Attic feast, in resemblance of the old Provencal courts of love. An interruption was caused by his father's death, the grief of which threw him into a dangerous illness. In 1570, Lucrezia, the elder of the sisters, married the heir of the Duke of Urbino. Tasso honoured these royal nuptials by a canzone, which was rewarded by many gifts and favours; but the principal influence of the event on his fortunes was, that it threw him more constantly and freely into the society of Leonora. Advancing with his great poem,--em bellishing it with magical graces,-infusing into it the expression of his growing love, he interwove with the main story a touching episode upon himself. He speaks of a heart devoted, desiring much, hoping little, and claiming nothing. If he could claim nothing however from the haughty blood that had usurped ascendency in Ferrara, he could demand all from the citizens; and when he delivered an oration at the opening of the Academy, the halo of fame brightened doubly round a head already crowned with the universal applause of Italy. Presently, he was summoned to attend the cardinal his patron on a mission into France, making a curious literary will before he went, and finding on arriving at Paris that his renown had gone before him. Under the golden lilies of the French throne, he interceded for a poor poet condemned to death, and obtained his pardon. effusions of Sappho-an anthologia of sentiment and fancy, enriched from a golden imagination of his own, and tuned in verse as flowing and harmonious as the music of a Grecian flute. When it was represented in the stately and gorgeous court of Ferrara, with every device of scenic charm and graceful interludes, that pictured to the eye the most magical witcheries of old romance, all the spectators acclaimed it as the crown of Italian poetry. The fame of it went from south to north, and the nations who had known Ariosto and Petrarca were startled to proud surprise by this genethliacon of a new genius in Tasso. But there was one for whose favour Tasso longed more than for the applause of Ferrara. To Leonora he read this touching and melting composition in the privacy of her chamber, and she, listening to the poetry, loved the poet. Happy he was in her affection; but Returning to Ferrara, the influence there was a cloud already blackening of his friends—the sisters especially-round his hopes. Jealous and base as gained him a new post in the duke's service, a liberal salary with nominal duties, that gave him liberty and peace to enrich the literature of Italy. He had come from France poor, with the same coat on his back as he had when he went there; but now Alfonso with prodigal munificence granted all his wishes, and anticipated some that were unspoken-crowned in return with a wreath more splendid than that golden ducal fillet which by inheritance descended on his brows-a lyric of praise from the gratitude of Tasso. In this famous poem he is thanked for his kindness to a stranger, and predicted as the leader of a Christian legion, to overthrow those Thracian devastators, the Mohammedan spoilers of Jerusalem. So the poet spent his time until 1572, when his lyre was engaged in lamenting the untimely death of Barbara, his patron's wife, seven years after the gorgeous nuptials that were going on when he came to Ferrara. Two years after he was appointed to the mathematical chair in the University of that city; and about this period he finished his "Aminta." In this sweet pastoral drama he interwove a thousand flowers of beauty from the fragments of Hesiod,-from the fables of Ovid,-from the idyls of Theocritus, -from the elegy of Bion,--from the odes of Anacreon, and the passionate | courtiers usually are, the courtiers of Alfonso were baser and more jealous than is customary even with their degraded tribe. While Tasso was conceiving new works of beauty, they were conspiring against him; and while the princes of Italy were vieing with each other to tempt him by lavish promises to bestow the honour of his companionship on them, these pestilent vermin swarmed in the avenues to power, endeavouring to poison the favour on which he fed. Solicitations from many cities and from many great men came to him to hasten the publication of his great poem; but he delayed in order to perfect it, and embellish it still more; and when at last he was ready to bequeath this treasure to the world, his misfortunes began, and the star that had been propitious to him paled away under a malignant eclipse. The snares of envy were set on every side. Let the names of the skulkers be forgotten. They endeavoured to intereept his correspondence; they sent spies to lurk about his apartments; agents to corrupt his servants; and succeeded in attaching one of their number to the confidential service of the Duke. That personage, like most princes, was generous from caprice, and unjust by habit. He was easily seduced into a participation in the plot, for he was weary of the superior genius |