In like manner, the idyl, which had played a prominent part in Boiardo's and in Ariosto's romance, detaches itself with a peculiar sweetness from the course of Tasso's narrative.

This appears in the story of Florindo, which contains within itself the germ of the _Aminta_, the _Pastor Fido_ and the _Adone_.[75] Together with the bad taste of the artificial pastoral, its preposterous costume (stanza 13), its luxury of tears (stanza 23), we find the tyranny of kisses (stanzas 28, 52), the yearning after the Golden Age (stanza 29), and all the other apparatus of that operatic species.

Tasso was the first poet to bathe Arcady in a golden afternoon light of sensuously sentimental pathos.

In his idyllic as in his lyrical interbreathings, melody seems absolutely demanded to interpret and complete the plangent rhythm of his dulcet numbers.
Emotion so far predominates over intelligence, so yearns to exhale itself in sound and shun the laws of language, that we find already in _Rinaldo_ Tasso's familiar _Non so che_ continually used to adumbrate sentiments for which plain words are not indefinite enough.
[Footnote 74: Canto iv.

47.] [Footnote 75: Canto v.