paid attention to topography, and sought to acquire what we now call local coloring for the details of his poem.  Without the sacrifice of truth in any important point, he contrived to give unity to the conduct of his narrative, while interweaving a number of fictitious characters and marvelous circumstances with the historical personages and actual events of the crusade.  The vital interest of the Gerusalemme Liberata flows from this interpolated material, from the loves of Rinaldo and Tancredi, from the adventures of the Pagan damsels Erminia, Armida and Clorinda.  The Gerusalemme is in truth a Virgilian epic, upon which a romantic poem has been engrafted.  Goffredo, idealized into statuesque frigidity, repeats the virtues of Aeneas; but the episode of Dido, which enlivens Virgil’s hero, is transferred to Rinaldo’s part in Tasso’s story.  The battles of Crusaders and Saracens are tedious copies of the battle in the tenth Aeneid; but the duels of Tancredi with Clorinda and Argante breathe the spirit and the fire of chivalry.  The celestial and infernal councils, adopted as machinery, recall the rival factions in Olympus; but the force by which the plot moves is love.  Pluto and the angel Gabriel are inactive by comparison with Armida, Erminia and Clorinda.  Tasso in truth thought that he was writing a religious and heroic poem.  What he did write, was a poem of sentiment and passion—­a romance.  Like Anacreon he might have cried: 

thelo legein Atreidas thelo de Kadmon adein, ha barbitos de chordais Erota mounon echei.

He displayed, indeed, marvelous ingenuity and art in so connecting the two strains of his subject, the stately Virgilian history and the glowing modern romance, that they should contribute to the working of a single plot.  Yet he could not succeed in vitalizing the former, whereas the latter will live as long as human interest in poetry endures.  No one who has studied the Gerusalemme returns with pleasure to Goffredo, or feels that the piety of the Christian heroes is inspired.  He skips canto after canto dealing with the crusade, to dwell upon those lyrical outpourings of love, grief, anguish, vain remorse and injured affection which the supreme poet of sentiment has invented for his heroines; he recognizes the genuine inspiration of Erminia’s pastoral idyl, of Armida’s sensuous charms, of Clorinda’s dying words, of the Siren’s song and the music of the magic bird:  of all, in fact, which is not pious in the poem.

Tancredi, between Erminia and Clorinda, the one woman adoring him, the other beloved by him—­the melancholy graceful modern Tancredi, Tasso’s own soul’s image—­is the veritable hero of the Gerusalemme; and by a curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the close, without a word.  The force of the poem is spiritualized and concentrated in Clorinda’s death, which may be cited as an instance of sublimity in pathos.  It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia