oh quante belle
    Luci il tempio celeste in se raguna! 
    Ha il suo gran carro il di; le aurate stelle
    Spiega la notte e l’argentata luna;
    Ma non e chi vagheggi o questa o quelle;
    E miriam noi torbida luce e bruna,
    Che un girar d’occhi, un balenar di riso
    Scopre in breve confin di fragil viso (xviii. 15).

This verbal music culminates in the two songs of earthly joy, the chants d’amour, or hymns to pleasure, sung by Armida’s ministers (xiv. 60-65, xvi. 12, 13).  Boiardo and Ariosto had painted the seductions of enchanted gardens, where valor was enthralled by beauty, and virtue dulled by voluptuous delights.  It remained for Tasso to give that magic of the senses vocal utterance.  From the myrtle groves of Orontes, from the spell-bound summer amid snows upon the mountains of the Fortunate Isle, these lyrics with their penetrative sweetness, their lingering regret, pass into the silence of the soul.  It is eminently characteristic of Tasso’s mood and age that the melody of both these honeyed songs should thrill with sadness.  Nature is at war with honor; youth passes like a flower away; therefore let us love and yield our hearts to pleasure while we can. Sehnsucht, the soul of modern sentiment, the inner core of modern music, makes its entrance into the sphere of art with these two hymns.  The division of the mind, wavering between natural impulse and acquired morality, gives the tone of melancholy to the one chant.  In the other, the invitation to self-abandonment is mingled with a forecast of old age and death.  Only Catullus, in his song to Lesbia, among the ancients touched this note; only Villon, perhaps, in his Ballade of Dead Ladies, touched it among the moderns before Tasso.  But it has gone on sounding ever since through centuries which have enjoyed the luxury of grief in music.

If Tancredi be the real hero of the Gerusalemme, Armida is the heroine.  The action of the epic follows her movements.  She combines the parts of Angelica and Alcina in one that is original and novel.  A sorceress, deputed by the powers of hell to defeat the arms of the crusaders, Armida falls herself in love with a Christian champion.  Love changes her from a beautiful white witch into a woman.[76] When she meets Rinaldo in the battle, she discharges all her arrows vainly at the man who has deserted her.  One by one, they fly and fall; and as they wing their flight, Love wounds her own heart with his shafts: 

    Scocca I’ arco piu volte, e non fa piaga
    E, mentre ella saetta, amor lei piaga (xx. 65).

Then she turns to die in solitude.  Rinaldo follows, and stays her in the suicidal act.  Despised and rejected as she is, she cannot hate him.  The man she had entangled in her wiles has conquered and subdued her nature.  To the now repentant minister of hell he proposes baptism; and Armida consents: