Tasso looked round with an ultra-sensitive temperament, and an ambition which required encouragement, and his poem is that of tenderness.  Every thing inclines to this point in his circle, with the tremulousness of the needle.  Love is its all in all, even to the design of the religious war which is to rescue the sepulchre of the God of Charity from the hands of the unloving.  His heroes are all in love, at least those on the right side; his leader, Godfrey, notwithstanding his prudence, narrowly escapes the passion, and is full of a loving consideration; his amazon, Clorinda, inspires the truest passion, and dies taking her lover’s hand; his Erminia is all love for an enemy; his enchantress Armida falls from pretended love into real, and forsakes her religion for its sake.  An old father (canto ix.) loses his five sons in battle, and dies on their dead bodies of a wound which he has provoked on purpose.  Tancred cannot achieve the enterprise of the Enchanted Forest, because his dead mistress seems to come out of one of the trees.  Olindo thinks it happiness to be martyred at the same stake with Sophronia.  The reconciliation of Rinaldo with his enchantress takes place within a few stanzas of the close of the poem, as if contesting its interest with religion.  The Jerusalem Delivered, in short, is the favourite epic of the young:  all the lovers in Europe have loved it.  The French have forgiven the author his conceits for the sake of his gallantry:  he is the poet of the gondoliers; and Spenser, the most luxurious of his brethren, plundered his bowers of bliss.  Read Tasso’s poem by this gentle light of his genius, and you pity him twentyfold, and know not what excuse to find for his jailer.

The stories translated in the present volume, though including war and magic, are all love-stories.  They were not selected on that account.  They suggested themselves for selection, as containing most of the finest things in the poem.  They are conducted with great art, and the characters and affections happily varied.  The first (Olindo and Sophronia) is perhaps unique for the hopelessness of its commencement (I mean with regard to the lovers), and the perfect, and at the same time quite probable, felicity of the conclusion.  There is no reason to believe that the staid and devout Sophronia would have loved her adorer at all, but for the circumstance that first dooms them both to a shocking death, and then sends them, with perfect warrant, from the stake to the altar.  Clorinda is an Amazon, the idea of whom, as such, it is impossible for us to separate from very repulsive and unfeminine images; yet, under the circumstances of the story, we call to mind in her behalf the possibility of a Joan of Arc’s having loved and been beloved; and her death is a surprising and most affecting variation upon that of Agrican in Boiardo.  Tasso’s enchantress Armida is a variation of the Angelica of the same poet, combined with Ariosto’s Alcina; but her passionate voluptuousness makes her quite