[Footnote 12:  ’Egli mi disse, allor che suo mi fece:  Tu canta, or che se’ ‘n ozio.’]

No wonder that the felicity of this moment expanded in a flower of lyric beauty which surpassed all that Tasso had yet published.  He produced Aminta in the winter of 1572-3.  It was acted with unparalleled applause; for this pastoral drama offered something ravishingly new, something which interpreted and gave a vocal utterance to tastes and sentiments that ruled the age.  While professing to exalt the virtues of rusticity, the Aminta was in truth a panegyric of Court life, and Silvia reflected Leonora in the magic mirror of languidly luxurious verse.  Poetry melted into music.  Emotion exhaled itself in sensuous harmony.  The art of the next two centuries, the supreme art of song, of words subservient to musical expression, had been indicated.  This explains the sudden and extraordinary success of the Aminta.  It was nothing less than the discovery of a new realm, the revelation of a specific faculty which made its author master of the heart of Italy.  The very lack of concentrated passion lent it power.  Its suffusion of emotion in a shimmering atmosphere toned with voluptuous melancholy, seemed to invite the lutes and viols, the mellow tenors, and the trained soprano voices of the dawning age of melody.  We may here remember that Palestrina, seven years earlier in Rome, had already given his Mass of Pope Marcello to the world.

Lucrezia d’Este, now Duchess of Urbino, who was anxious to share the raptures of Aminta, invited Tasso to Pesaro in the summer of 1573, and took him with her to the mountain villa of Casteldurante.  She was an unhappy wife, just on the point of breaking her irksome bonds of matrimony.  Tasso, if we may credit the deductions which have been drawn from passages in his letters, had the privilege of consoling the disappointed woman and of distracting her tedious hours.  They roamed together through the villa gardens, and spent days of quiet in the recesses of her apartments.  He read aloud passages from his unpublished poem, and composed sonnets in her honor, praising the full-blown beauty of the rose as lovelier than its budding charm.  The duke her husband, far from resenting this intimacy, heaped favors and substantial gifts upon his former comrade.  He had not, indeed, enough affection for his wife to be jealous of her.  Yet it is indubitable that if he had suspected her of infidelity the Italian code of honor would have compelled him to make short work with Tasso.[13]

[Footnote 13:  This is how he wrote in his Diary about Lucrezia.  ’Finally the Duke decided upon his marriage with Donna Lucrezia d’Este, which took place, though little to his taste, for she was old enough to have been his mother.’  ’The Duchess wished to return to Ferrara, where she subsequently chose to remain, a resolution which gave no annoyance to her husband; for, as she was unlikely to bring him a family, her absence mattered little.’  ’February 15, 1598.  Heard that Madame Lucrezia d’Este, Duchess of Urbino, my wife, died at Ferrara during the night of the 11th.’ (Dennistoun’s Dukes of Urbino, vol. iii. pp. 127, 146, 156.) Francesco Maria had been attached in Spain to a lady of unsuitable condition, and his marriage with Lucrezia was arranged to keep him out of a mesalliance.]