Between the king of rivers’ horns (he cries)
Stands what is now a small and humble town, &c.
Stanza vi. lines 1 and 2.
Fluviorum rex Eridanus.
The town is Ferrara.
as white,
My lord, as is your banner’s snowy grain.
Stanza xiv. lines 5 and 6.
Another allusion to the white eagle of the house of Este.
There moves no leaf beneath, thou hast to know,
But here above some sign thereof we trace;
Since all, in heaven above or earth below,
Must correspond, though with a different face, &c.
Stanza xviii. lines 1, 2, 3, 4.
It is impossible to read these lines without thinking of something like a correspondent passage in the fifth book of The Paradise Lost, where Raphael, addressing Adam, as St. John does Astolpho, says,
Though what if Earth
Be but the shadow of Heaven, and things therein
Each to other like more than on Earth is thought?
The followers of the mystic philosophers in the age of Ariosto and that of Milton seem to have believed in the existence of two worlds, one of things and the other of types, perhaps from
