Solvesi, e restan sol gli altri desiri.
_Ecco l'ancilla tua_; d'essa a tuo senno
Dispon, gli disse, e le fia legge il cenno (xx. 136).

[Footnote 76: I may incidentally point out how often this motive has
supplied the plot to modern ballets.]

This metamorphosis of the enchantress into the woman in Armida, is the
climax of the _Gerusalemme_. It is also the climax and conclusion of
Italian romantic poetry, the resolution of its magic and marvels into
the truths of human affection. Notice, too, with what audacity Tasso has
placed the words of Mary on the lips of his converted sorceress!
Deliberately planning a religious and heroic poem, he assigns the spoils
of conquered hell to love triumphant in a woman's breast. Beauty, which
in itself is diabolical, the servant of the lords of Hades, attains to
apotheosis through affection. In Armida we already surmise _das ewig
Weibliche_ of Goethe's Faust, Gretchen saving her lover's soul before
Madonna's throne in glory.

What was it, then, that Tasso, this 'child of a later and a colder age,'
as Shelley called him, gave of permanent value to European literature?
We have seen that the _Gerusalemme_ did not fulfill the promise of
heroic poetry for that eminently unheroic period. We know that neither
the Virgilian hero nor the laboriously developed theme commands the
interest of posterity. We feel that religious emotion is feeble here,
and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of
expiring in those Latinistic artifices. Yet the interwoven romance
contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and
evanescent--_un non so che_, to use the poet's favorite phrase--which
riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with
our own sensibility to beauty. Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of
passion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of
that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment. Unknown to the
ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with
clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as
determined by the Classical Revival, sentiment, that _non so che_ of
modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Tasso's work. The
phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this
poet's verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere
of European feeling. Vague, indistinct, avoiding outline, the phrase _un
non so che_ leaves de