The battle joined, and great was the bravery and the slaughter on both sides.  It seemed at first all glitter and gaiety—­its streamers flying, its arms flashing, drums and trumpets rejoicing, and horses rushing with their horsemen as to the tournament.  Horror looked beautiful in the spectacle.  Out of the midst of the dread itself there issued a delight.  But soon it was a bloody, and a turbulent, and a raging, and a groaning thing:—­pennons down, horses and men rolling over, foes heaped upon one another, bright armour exchanged for blood and dirt, flesh trampled, and spirit fatigued.  Brave were the Pagans; but how could they stand against Heaven?  Godfrey ordered every thing calmly, like a divine mind; Rinaldo swept down the fiercest multitudes, like an arm of God.  The besieged in the citadel broke forth, only to let the conquerors in.  Jerusalem was won before the battle was over.  King after king fell, and yet the vanquished did not fly.  Rinaldo went every where to hasten the rout; and still had to fight and slay on.  Armida beheld him coming where she sat in the midst of her knights; he saw her, and blushed a little:  she turned as cold as ice, then as hot as fire.  Her anger was doubled by the slaughter of her friends; and with her woman’s hand she sent an arrow out of her bow, hoping, and yet even then hoping not, to slay or to hurt him.  The arrow fell on him like a toy; and he turned aside, as she thought, in disdain.  Yet he disdained not to smite down her champions.  Hope of every kind deserted her.  Resolving to die by herself in some lonely spot, she got down from her chariot to horse, and fled out of the field.  Rinaldo saw the flight; and though one of the knights that remained to her struck him such a blow as made him reel in his saddle, he despatched the man with another like a thunderbolt, and then galloped after the fugitive.

Armida was in the act of putting a shaft to her bosom, in order to die upon it, when her arm was arrested by a mighty grasp; and turning round, she beheld with a shriek the beloved face of him who had caused the ruin of her and hers.  She closed her disdainful eyes and fainted away.  Rinaldo supported her; he loosened her girdle; he bathed her bosom and her eyelids with his tears.  Coming at length to herself, still she would not look at him.  She would fain not have been supported by him.  She endeavoured with her weak fingers to undo the strong ones that clasped her; she wept bitterly, and at length spoke, but still without meeting his eyes.

“And may I not,” she said, “even die? must I be followed and tormented even in my last moments?  What mockery of a wish to save me is this!  I will not be watched; I believe not a syllable of such pity; and I will not be made a sight of, and a by-word.  I ask my life of thee no longer; I want nothing but death; and death itself I would not receive at such hands; they would render even that felicity hateful.  Leave me.  I could not be hindered long from putting an end to my miseries, whatever barbarous restraint might be put upon me.  There are a thousand ways of dying; and I will be neither hindered, nor deceived, nor flattered—­oh, never more!”