a.
Tasso in truth thought that he was writing a religious and heroic poem.
What he did write, was a poem of sentiment and passion--a romance. Like
Anacreon he might have cried:

thelo legein Atreidas
thelo de Kadmon adein,
ha barbitos de chordais
Erota mounon echei.

He displayed, indeed, marvelous ingenuity and art in so connecting the
two strains of his subject, the stately Virgilian history and the
glowing modern romance, that they should contribute to the working of a
single plot. Yet he could not succeed in vitalizing the former, whereas
the latter will live as long as human interest in poetry endures. No one
who has studied the _Gerusalemme_ returns with pleasure to Goffredo, or
feels that the piety of the Christian heroes is inspired. He skips canto
after canto dealing with the crusade, to dwell upon those lyrical
outpourings of love, grief, anguish, vain remorse and injured affection
which the supreme poet of sentiment has invented for his heroines; he
recognizes the genuine inspiration of Erminia's pastoral idyl, of
Armida's sensuous charms, of Clorinda's dying words, of the Siren's
song and the music of the magic bird: of all, in fact, which is not
pious in the poem.

Tancredi, between Erminia and Clorinda, the one woman adoring him, the
other beloved by him--the melancholy graceful modern Tancredi, Tasso's
own soul's image--is the veritable hero of the _Gerusalemme_; and by a
curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the
close, without a word. The force of the poem is spiritualized and
concentrated in Clorinda's death, which may be cited as an instance of
sublimity in pathos. It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia among the
shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida's garden.
Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Tasso
bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the
last, is poetically of no importance whatsoever. Argante, Solimano,
Tisaferno, excite our interest, and win the sympathy we cannot spare the
saintly hero; and in the death of Solimano Tasso's style, for once,
verges upon tragic sublimity.

What Tasso aimed at in the _Gerusalemme_ was nobility. This quality had
not been prominent in Ariosto's art. If he could attain it, his ambition
to rival the _Orlando Furioso_ would be satisfied. One main condition of
success Tasso brought to the achievement. His mind itself was eminently
noble, i