n. Marino
had the improvisatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial
passion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his
birthplace. He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and
contrast to pervading beauty.

[Footnote 196: There are passages of pure _cantilena_ in this poem,
where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the
mere vehicle for rhythmic melody. Of this verbal music the dirge of the
nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples
(xix. pp. 358-361). Note especially the stanza beginning:

Adone, Adone, o bell'Adon, tu giaci,
Ne senti i miei sospir, ne miri il pianto!
O bell'Adone, o caro Adon, tu taci,
Ne rispondi a colei che amasti tanto!

There is nothing more similar to this in literature than Fra Jacopone's
delirium of mystic love:

Amor amor Jesu, son giunto a porto;
Amor amor Jesu, tu m'hai menato;
Amor amor Jesu, dammi conforto;
Amor amor Jesu, si m'hai enfiamato.

Only the one is written in a Mixo-Lydian, the other in a Hyper-Phrygian
mood.
]

A serious fault to be found with Marino's style is its involved
exaggeration in description. Who, for instance, can tolerate this
picture of a young man's foot shod with a blue buskin?

L'animato del pie molle alabastro
Che oscura il latte del sentier celeste
Stretto alla gamba con purpureo nastro
Di cuoio azzurro un borsacchin gli veste.

Again he carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric,
introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Tasso, with which luckless
heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world
in long soliloquies. The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina's
feelings after she has felt the pangs of love for Adonis, might pass for
a parody:

Ardo, lassa, o non ardo! ahi qual io sento
Stranio nel cor non conosciuto affetto!
E forse ardore? ardor non e, che spento
L'avrei col pianto; e ben d'ardor sospetto!
Sospetto no, piuttosto egli e tormento.
Come tormento fia, se da diletto?

And so forth through eighty lines in which every conceivable change is
rung upon _Amo o non amo?... Io vivo e moro pur.... Io non ho core
e lo mio cor n'ha dui.... With all this effort no one is convinced of
Falserina's emotion, and her long-winded oration reads like a
schoolboy's exercise upon some line of the fourth Aeneid. Yet if we
allow the sense of rhythmical melody to i