THE MADNESS OF ORLANDO

     From ‘Orlando Furioso,’ Canto 23

     The course in pathless woods, which without rein
       The Tartar’s charger had pursued astray,
     Made Roland for two days, with fruitless pain,
       Follow him, without tidings of his way. 
     Orlando reached a rill of crystal vein,
       On either bank of which a meadow lay;
     Which, stained with native hues and rich, he sees,
     And dotted o’er with fair and many trees.

     The mid-day fervor made the shelter sweet
       To hardy herd as well as naked swain: 
     So that Orlando well beneath the heat
       Some deal might wince, opprest with plate and chain. 
     He entered for repose the cool retreat,
       And found it the abode of grief and pain;
     And place of sojourn more accursed and fell
     On that unhappy day, than tongue can tell.

     Turning him round, he there on many a tree
       Beheld engraved, upon the woody shore,
     What as the writing of his deity
       He knew, as soon as he had marked the lore. 
     This was a place of those described by me,
       Whither oft-times, attended by Medore,
     From the near shepherd’s cot had wont to stray
     The beauteous lady, sovereign of Catay.

     In a hundred knots, amid these green abodes,
       In a hundred parts, their ciphered names are dight;
     Whose many letters are so many goads,
       Which Love has in his bleeding heart-core pight. 
     He would discredit in a thousand modes,
       That which he credits in his own despite;
     And would perforce persuade himself, that rind
     Other Angelica than his had signed.

     “And yet I know these characters,” he cried,
       “Of which I have so many read and seen;
     By her may this Medoro be belied,
       And me, she, figured in the name, may mean.” 
     Feeding on such like phantasies, beside
       The real truth, did sad Orlando lean
     Upon the empty hope, though ill contented,
     Which he by self-illusions had fomented.

     But stirred and aye rekindled it, the more
       That he to quench the ill suspicion wrought,
     Like the incautious bird, by fowler’s lore,
       Hampered in net or lime; which, in the thought
     To free its tangled pinions and to soar,
       By struggling is but more securely caught. 
     Orlando passes thither, where a mountain
     O’erhangs in guise of arch the crystal fountain.

* * * * *

     Here from his horse the sorrowing county lit,
       And at the entrance of the grot surveyed
     A cloud of words, which seemed but newly writ,
       And which the young Medoro’s hand had made. 
     On the great pleasure he had known in it,
       This sentence he in verses had arrayed;
     Which to his tongue, I deem, might make pretense
     To polished phrase; and such in ours the sense:—­