thrills so subtly, touches the soul so sweetly and so sadly, as it does in Tasso’s verse.  But in all those five thousand octave stanzas it is rarely altogether absent.  The singing faculty of the Neapolitan was given to this poet of voluptuousness; and if the song is neither deep nor stirring, neither stately nor sublime, it is because his soul held nothing in its vast vacuity but sensuous joy.[196] A musical Casanova, an unmalignant Aretino, he sang as vulgar nature prompted; but he always kept on singing.  His partiality for detonating dissonances, squibs and crackers of pyrotechnical rhetoric, braying trumpets and exploding popguns, which deafen and distract our ears attuned to the suave cadence of the cantilena, is no less characteristic of the Neapolitan.  Marino had the improvisatory exuberance, the impudence, the superficial passion, the luxurious delight in life, and the noisiness of his birthplace.  He also shared its love of the grotesque as complement and contrast to pervading beauty.

[Footnote 196:  There are passages of pure cantilena in this poem, where sense is absolutely swallowed up in sound, and words become the mere vehicle for rhythmic melody.  Of this verbal music the dirge of the nymphs for Adonis and the threnos of Venus afford excellent examples (xix. pp. 358-361).  Note especially the stanza beginning: 

    Adone, Adone, o bell’Adon, tu giaci,
    Ne senti i miei sospir, ne miri il pianto! 
    O bell’Adone, o caro Adon, tu taci,
    Ne rispondi a colei che amasti tanto!

There is nothing more similar to this in literature than Fra Jacopone’s delirium of mystic love: 

    Amor amor Jesu, son giunto a porto;
    Amor amor Jesu, tu m’hai menato;
    Amor amor Jesu, dammi conforto;
    Amor amor Jesu, si m’hai enfiamato.

Only the one is written in a Mixo-Lydian, the other in a Hyper-Phrygian mood. ]

A serious fault to be found with Marino’s style is its involved exaggeration in description.  Who, for instance, can tolerate this picture of a young man’s foot shod with a blue buskin?

    L’animato del pie molle alabastro
    Che oscura il latte del sentier celeste
    Stretto alla gamba con purpureo nastro
    Di cuoio azzurro un borsacchin gli veste.

Again he carries to the point of lunacy that casuistical rhetoric, introduced by Ariosto and refined upon by Tasso, with which luckless heroines or heroes announce their doubts and difficulties to the world in long soliloquies.  The ten stanzas which set forth Falserina’s feelings after she has felt the pangs of love for Adonis, might pass for a parody: 

    Ardo, lassa, o non ardo! ahi qual io sento
    Stranio nel cor non conosciuto affetto! 
    E forse ardore? ardor non e, che spento
    L’avrei col pianto; e ben d’ardor sospetto! 
    Sospetto no, piuttosto egli e tormento. 
    Come tormento fia, se da diletto?