his senior, seemed to embody all the
graces and to completely satisfy the ideal which up to this time he had
been able to see only with his mind's eye. Leonora had already been
sought in marriage by many titled suitors, but she had invariably turned
a deaf ear to such proposals, never finding one who could please her
fancy or who promised comfort in her loneliness. For she was lonely in
that court, as she seems to have dwelt in a sort of spiritual isolation
most of the time; there was always a melancholy air about her, which had
no doubt been induced in large measure by her mother's sad fate. For
Tasso to love her was most natural; but they both knew that such a love
could be but hopeless, and it cannot be said that she encouraged him in
any covert manner or that he made open profession of his passion. It is
true that he makes her the subject of many of his poems, wherein he
lauds her to the skies, but this is no more than was expected of a court
poet; he did the same for other ladies, but in all that was dedicated to
her charms there seems to shine forth a truer light of real affection
than is found in all the others. What words of affection, if any, passed
between them can never be known; but it seems that there must have been
some sort of tacit consent to his silent adoration, and Tasso tells in a
madrigal, perhaps in proof of this, that once, when he had asked her
pardon for having put his arm upon her own in the eagerness of
conversation, she replied, with gentleness: "You offended, not by
putting your arm there, but by taking it away!"

For twelve years Tasso remained at Ferrara, constantly writing sonnets
and short poems of all descriptions, which were most often addressed to
Leonora, but at the same time he was busily working upon that longer
poem in epic form, descriptive of the First Crusade, the _Gerusalemme
liberata_, wherein he puts a new feeling into Italian poetry, which had
been expressed before by Ariosto in his amatory verse, but which cannot
be found to any great extent in his more pretentious work, the _Orlando
Furioso_. This new feeling was real sentiment, and not sentimentality,
and it denotes the growing conception of the worth and dignity of
womanhood which we have already discovered in the poetry of Michael
Angelo. Allowing for the infinite contradictions possible in human
nature, it may be that these men of the same time, who so coolly killed
their wives and sisters for acts of infidelity, were