Si parla, e prega; e i preghi bagna e scalda Or di lagrime rare, or di sospiri:  Onde, siccome suol nevosa falda Dov’arde il sole, o tepid’ aura spiri, Cosi l’ira che in lei parea si salda, Solvesi, e restan sol gli altri desiri. Ecco l’ancilla tua; d’essa a tuo senno Dispon, gli disse, e le fia legge il cenno (xx. 136).

[Footnote 76:  I may incidentally point out how often this motive has supplied the plot to modern ballets.]

This metamorphosis of the enchantress into the woman in Armida, is the climax of the Gerusalemme.  It is also the climax and conclusion of Italian romantic poetry, the resolution of its magic and marvels into the truths of human affection.  Notice, too, with what audacity Tasso has placed the words of Mary on the lips of his converted sorceress!  Deliberately planning a religious and heroic poem, he assigns the spoils of conquered hell to love triumphant in a woman’s breast.  Beauty, which in itself is diabolical, the servant of the lords of Hades, attains to apotheosis through affection.  In Armida we already surmise das ewig Weibliche of Goethe’s Faust, Gretchen saving her lover’s soul before Madonna’s throne in glory.

What was it, then, that Tasso, this ‘child of a later and a colder age,’ as Shelley called him, gave of permanent value to European literature?  We have seen that the Gerusalemme did not fulfill the promise of heroic poetry for that eminently unheroic period.  We know that neither the Virgilian hero nor the laboriously developed theme commands the interest of posterity.  We feel that religious emotion is feeble here, and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of expiring in those Latinistic artifices.  Yet the interwoven romance contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and evanescent—­un non so che, to use the poet’s favorite phrase—­which riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with our own sensibility to beauty.  Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of passion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment.  Unknown to the ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as determined by the Classical Revival, sentiment, that non so che of modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Tasso’s work.  The phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this poet’s verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere of European feeling.  Vague, indistinct, avoiding outline, the phrase un non so che leaves definition to the instinct of those who feel, but will not risk the limitation of their feeling by submitting it to words.  Nothing in antique psychology demanded a term of this kind.  Classical literature, in close affinity to sculpture, dealt with concrete images and conscious thoughts.