The following beautiful and touching lines, in which he alludes to the worst period of his life,--his separation from his mother, when called away from Naples to join his father at Rome,--have been absurdly attributed to him as actually penned at this date. Hoole, and even Hunt, two of his modern translators, have fallen into this error; whereas a moment's consideration would convince any man, who understood the difference between adult poetry and puerile attempts at rhyming, that such verses, at such an age, (nine years!) would have been sufficiently remarkable to justify belief in the fables of his babyhood, when he sat talking pretty unbroken Italian on his mother's knee, before he was twelve months old.
The passage occurs in a figurative canzonet on the river Metauso, but addressed to the duke of Urbino, imploring refuge and protection in his adversity. Though left unfinished, the fragment is acknowledged to be one of the most exquisitely wrought of all the author's lyrics:--
"Me dal sen della madre empia Fortuna Pargoletto divelse: ah! di que' baci, Ch' ella bagnò di lagrime dolenti, Con sospir mi rimembra, e degli ardenti Preghi, che sen portar l' aure fugaci, Ch' io giunger non dovea più volto à volto Fra quelle braccia accolto Con nodi così stretti, e sì tenaci. Lasso! e seguii con mal sicure piante, Qual Ascanio, o Cammilla, il padre errante."
"Me, from a tender mother's breast, Stern Fortune, while an infant, tore; Ah! I remember how she press'd. Press'd me, and kiss'd me, o'er and o'er, Bathed with her tears, with doleful sighs, Breathed for me many a fervent prayer, Which, ere it reach'd the skies, Was scatter'd by the passing air.
"For I was nevermore to meet That parent face to face, Clasp'd in her clear embrace, With folds so strait, so binding and so sweet. Alas! 't was mine thenceforth to roam With ill-supporting feet, And, like Ascanius o'er the trackless floods, Or young Camilla, cast on wilds and woods, Follow a wandering father without home."
These lines--breathing forth such grateful recollections of maternal tenderness, watching, weeping, praying, over a most beloved and affectionate child, from whom she was parting for ever, and who was destined to be far greater than even she, in her fondest entrancement, could have hoped--remind us of our own Cowper's filial reminiscences, in "words that weep," translating "tears that speak," on receiving, at a more distant period of a suffering life, his mother's picture: at sight of which, for a while, he lived over again, with a thousand times more intense delight, the scenes of infancy, renewed, like a vision of pre-existence in some happier state than that which had intervened since he had borne the burthen and heat of a long day of life consumed in anguish of spirit, for which, on this side of the grave, he found no solace, and beyond it, no hope for his bewildered mind; dark as Egypt under the ninth plague in that quarter, though, in every other, light as the land of Goshen. Between Tasso and Cowper there were many traits of sad as well as noble resemblance--kindred genius, a kindred malady, and kindred misfortunes; but not kindred alleviations: the advantage here was on our countryman's side; but his disease lay deeper than that of the former, and the symptoms, if not so violent after the first terrible attack, were more inveterate; so that, contemplating the fate of the glorious Italian under eclipse, and pitying him with a sympathy which no man living but himself could feel, Cowper might have drawn the same comparison between Tasso's case and his own, as he has done in those heart-wringing verses (the last which he is recorded to have composed) under the title of "The Castaway." These were founded upon a circumstance mentioned in Anson's Voyage, of a sailor who fell overboard in a storm, when the ship could not be stayed to rescue him, but who followed in its wake, crying after it, and being heard by his companions, while he