ou only thus,
Untamed wild creature, wilder than the rest,
Deniest love the harbourage of thy breast.
List to yon nightingale
Singing within the vale
'I love, love, love.'
With what renewed embracement vine clasps vine,
Fir blends its boughs with fir, and pine with pine.
Beneath the rugged bark
May'st thou mute inward sighings mark,
And wilt thou graceless be
Less than a vine or tree--
To keep thyself unloving, loverless?
Bend, bend thy stubborn heart
Fool that thou art."

But the physical peculiarity which actually identifies Villa d'Este as
the locale of the poem is its cliff, the "sheer crag" from whence
Amyntas leaps in his despair.

"Now did he lead me where the cloven steep
Among the rocks and solitary crags
Looms pathless and breaks sheer above a vale.
There paused we, and I, peering far below,
Shuddered, drew from the brink.

* * *

'Sylvia, I come, I follow!' So he cried:
Then headlong leaped,--and left me turned to stone."

There are other poems of Tasso's which refer to his residence at Villa
d'Este, and infer Leonora's presence at that time. We may cite in
particular the canzone to Leonora at her uncle's villa, beginning "_Al
nobil colle ove in antichi marmi_":

"To the romantic hills where free
To thine enchanted eyes
Works of Greek art in statuary
Of antique marbles rise,
My thought, fair Leonora, roves,
And with it to their gloomy groves
Fast bears me as it flies.
For far from thee, in crowds unblest,
My fluttering heart but ill can rest.

"There to the rock, cascade, and grove,
On mosses dropt with dew,
Like one who thinks and sighs of love
The livelong summer through,
Oft would I dictate glorious things
Of heroes to the Tuscan strings
On my sweet lyre anew,
And to the brooks and trees around
Ippolito's high name resound."

This poem would seem to imply that a part of the _Jerusalem_ was written
here, possibly the episode of Sophronia and Olindo, so dear to Tasso
himself that though it was not an integral part of the epic he dared the
Inquisition rather than comply with the demands of the censor that it
should be stricken out. The description of Sophronia is admitted to have
been intended to denote Leonora:

"Amongst them in the city lived a maid
The flower of virgins in her perfect prime,
Supremely beautifu