Ma s’egli avverra pur che mia ventura
    Nel mio ritorno mi rinchiuda il passo,
    D’uom che in amor m’e padre a te la cura
    E delle fide mie donzelle io lasso.

The limpid well of native utterance is troubled at its source by scholastic artifices in these as in so many other passages of Tasso’s masterpiece.  Nor was he yet emancipated from the weakness of Rinaldo.  Trying to soar upon the borrowed plumes of pseudo-classical sublimity, he often fell back wearied by this uncongenial effort into prose.  Lame endings to stanzas, sudden descents from highly-wrought to pedestrian diction, are not uncommon in the Gerusalemme.  The poet, diffident of his own inspiration, sought inspiration from books.  In the magnificence of single lines again, the Gerusalemme reminds us of Rinaldo.  Tasso gained dignity of rhythm by choosing Latin adjectives and adverbs with pompous cadences.  No versifier before his date had consciously employed the sonorous music of such lines as the following:—­

    Foro, tentando inaccessibil via (ii. 29).

    Ond’ Amor l’arco inevitabil tende (iii. 24).

    Questa muraglia impenetrabil fosse (iii. 51).

    Furon vedute fiammeggiare insieme (v. 28).

    Qual capitan ch’inespugnabil terra (v. 64).

    Sotto l’inevitabile tua spada (xvi. 33).

    Immense solitudini d’arena (xvii.  I).

The last of these lines presents an impressive landscape in three melodious words.

These verbal and stylistic criticisms are not meant to cast reproach on Tasso as a poet.  If they have any value, it is the light they throw upon conditions under which the poet was constrained to work.  Humanism and the Catholic Revival reduced this greatest genius of his age to the necessity of clothing religious sentiments in scholastic phraseology, with the view of attaining to epic grandeur.  But the Catholic Revival was no regeneration of Christianity from living sources; and humanism had run its course in Italy, and was ending in the sands of critical self-consciousness.  Thus piety in Tasso appears superficial and conventional rather than profoundly felt or originally vigorous; while the scholarship which supplied his epic style is scrupulous and timid.

The enduring qualities of Tasso as a modern poet have still to be indicated; and to this more grateful portion of my argument I now address myself.  Much might be said in the first place about his rhetorical dexterity—­the flexibility of language in his hands, and the copiousness of thought, whereby he was able to adorn varied situations and depict diversity of passions with appropriate diction.  Whether Alete is subtly pleading a seductive cause, or Goffredo is answering his sophistries with well-weighed arguments; whether Pluto addresses the potentates of hell, or Erminia wavers between love and honor; whether Tancredi pours forth the extremity of his despair, or Armida heaps reproaches on Rinaldo in his flight; the musical and luminously polished stanzas lend themselves without change of style to every gradation of the speaker’s mood.  In this art of rhetoric, Tasso seems to have taken Livy for his model; and many of his speeches which adorn the graver portions of his poem are noticeable for compact sententious wisdom.