original by expanding i : I think, on the contrary, though Ariosto’s stanza is a very pretty one, that the idea has suffered from dilation. Dante says (applying the simile also to a limb torn from a man, transformed into a tree)
Come d’un stizzo verde ch’ arco sia
Da l’un de’ lati, che da l’ altro geme,
E cigola per vento, che và via
L’Inferno, canto xiii.
As a brand yet green,
Which burning at one end from the other sends
A groaning sound, and hisses with the wind
That forces out its way.
Carey’s Translation.
Where Rogero also offers, if in his power, to compensate the myrtle for the injury he had inflicted, Ariosto has followed Dante, describing the same prodigy, in his xiiith canto. Both imitated Virgil in the main fact; but Ariosto in the end of the xxviith and the beginning of the xxviiith stanza, had Ovid also in his eye, from whom those passages are translated. The lines imitated are
Contremuit, gemitumque dedit decidua quercus;
and afterwards,
Editus et medio sonus est de robore talis.
A peer of France, Astolpho was my name.
Stanza xxxiii. line 1.
Astolpho’s transformation into a tree is certainly an improvement of the story of Polydore in Virgil, which is ridiculous, if considered as a natural phenomenon. But magic gets rid of all difficulties. Ariosto is supposed to have selected the myrtle as sacred to Venus, and, therefore, figurative of Astolpho’s propensities. If the poet had this in his eye, he seems to have punished Astolpho rather according to the character by which he is distinguished in the Innamorato than that in which he
