It is not that we do not find similar lyrical interbreathings in the narrative of Ariosto.  But Tasso developed the lyrism of the octave stanza into something special, lulling the soul upon gentle waves of rising and falling rhythm, foreshadowing the coming age of music in cadences that are untranslateable except by vocal melody.  In like manner, the idyl, which had played a prominent part in Boiardo’s and in Ariosto’s romance, detaches itself with a peculiar sweetness from the course of Tasso’s narrative.  This appears in the story of Florindo, which contains within itself the germ of the Aminta, the Pastor Fido and the Adone.[75] Together with the bad taste of the artificial pastoral, its preposterous costume (stanza 13), its luxury of tears (stanza 23), we find the tyranny of kisses (stanzas 28, 52), the yearning after the Golden Age (stanza 29), and all the other apparatus of that operatic species.  Tasso was the first poet to bathe Arcady in a golden afternoon light of sensuously sentimental pathos.  In his idyllic as in his lyrical interbreathings, melody seems absolutely demanded to interpret and complete the plangent rhythm of his dulcet numbers.  Emotion so far predominates over intelligence, so yearns to exhale itself in sound and shun the laws of language, that we find already in Rinaldo Tasso’s familiar Non so che continually used to adumbrate sentiments for which plain words are not indefinite enough.

[Footnote 74:  Canto iv. 47.]

[Footnote 75:  Canto v. 12-57.]

The Rinaldo was a very remarkable production for a young man of eighteen.  It showed the poet in possession of his style and displayed the specific faculties of his imagination.  Nothing remained for Tasso now but to perfect and develop the type of art which he had there created.  Soon after his first settlement in Ferrara, he began to meditate a more ambitious undertaking.  His object was to produce the heroic poem for which Italy had long been waiting, and in this way to rival or surpass the fame of Ariosto.  Trissino had chosen a national subject for his epic; but the Italia Liberata was an acknowledged failure, and neither the past nor the present conditions of the Italian people offered good material for a serious poem.  The heroic enthusiasms of the age were religious.  Revived Catholicism had assumed an attitude of defiance.  The Company of Jesus was declaring its crusade against heresy and infidelity throughout the world.  Not a quarter of a century had elapsed since Charles V. attacked the Mussulman in Tunis; and before a few more years had passed, the victory of Lepanto was to be won by Italian and Spanish navies.  Tasso, therefore, obeyed a wise instinct when he made choice of the first crusade for his theme, and of Godfrey of Boulogne for his hero.  Having to deal with historical facts, he studied the best authorities in chronicles, ransacked such books of geography and travel as were then accessible,