the lines of Tasso, and utter them three centuries after the poet:

"'Canto l'armi pietose e'l Capitano
Che'l gran Sepolcro liberò di Christo!'

"The motive is in itself plaintive; it has a sustained sigh, a
monotone of grief. But the gondoliers give it a special quality by
prolonging certain tones--as when distant rays of brilliant light
are reflected on the waves. This song had deeply impressed us long
ago. It was impossible to treat of Tasso without taking, as it
were, as text for our thoughts, this homage rendered by the nation
to the genius whose love and loyalty were ill merited by the court
of Ferrara. The Venetian melody breathes so sharp a melancholy,
such hopeless sadness, that it suffices in itself to reveal the
secret of Tasso's grief. It lent itself, like the poet's
imagination, to the world's brilliant illusions, to the smooth and
false coquetry of those smiles that brought the dreadful
catastrophe in their train, for which there seemed to be no
compensation in this world. And yet upon the Capitol the poet was
clothed with a mantle of purer and more brilliant purple than that
of Alphonse."

With the help of the composer's plot, the intent of the music becomes
clear, to the dot almost of the note. The whole poem is an exposition of
the one sovereign melody, where we may feel a kindred trait of Hungarian
song, above all in the cadences, that must have stirred Liszt's patriot
heart. Nay,--beginning as it does with melancholy stress of the phrase
of cadence and the straying into full rhythmitic exultation, it seems
(in strange guise) another