ounds as waters in their marble fountains and conduits.

"All the melodies that had been growing through two centuries in
Italy [says Symonds] are concentrated in the songs of the _Amyntas_
and the _Pastor Fido_. The idyllic voluptuousness which permeated
literature and art steeps their pictures in a golden glow. While we
recognise in both these poems--the one perfumed and delicate like
flowers of spring, the other sculptured in pure forms of classic
grace--evident signs of a civilisation sinking to decay, we are
bound to confess that to this goal the Italian genius had been
steadily advancing. They complete and close the Renaissance."

But the living quality in the _Amyntas_ which makes it a thousand-fold
more real to us than the Elizabethan masques is not its perfectness of
form but the stamp which it bears of being the expression of personal
experience and longing but thinly veiled in poetic imagery. Reading the
poem at Villa d'Este we read between the lines and recognise the _scena_
of the pastoral and the love which inspired its plot.

In spite of the changes wrought by time we discover the origin of each
descriptive passage. This rocky reservoir whose shadowy surface seems to
mirror reflections of mysterious faces is surely--

"Dian's pool
Where the great plane's cool shade to cooler waves
Invites the huntress nymphs."

Its encircling laurel thickets might mask to-day strange woodland
deities like the Satyr of the play who while Sylvia bathed

"Crouched lynx-eyed among the thick-set shrubs."

The description of the tumultuous pursuit of this Satyr calls up so
vividly the Polyphemus in the _Triumph of Galatea_ that we are convinced
that Tasso must have been influenced by Raphael's great painting in the
Farnesina.

"Not all am I
A despicable thing,..."

He makes the Satyr say;

"This ruddy russet front, these shoulders huge,
These nervy bull-thewed arms, this silky breast,
And these my velvet thighs are manhood's mould robust.
Ill favoured I? Not so!"

As one listens to the delirious nightingales in the dim, green-arched
_allees_, one forgets the trysting trees in other Italian gardens and is
sure that only here could Daphne have drawn her argument for love from
their caresses.

"_Daphne:_

The gentle, jocund spring,
Smiling and wantoning,
Makes all things amorous.
Th