Yet he could not succeed in vitalizing the former, whereas the latter will live as long as human interest in poetry endures.

No one who has studied the _Gerusalemme_ returns with pleasure to Goffredo, or feels that the piety of the Christian heroes is inspired.

He skips canto after canto dealing with the crusade, to dwell upon those lyrical outpourings of love, grief, anguish, vain remorse and injured affection which the supreme poet of sentiment has invented for his heroines; he recognizes the genuine inspiration of Erminia's pastoral idyl, of Armida's sensuous charms, of Clorinda's dying words, of the Siren's song and the music of the magic bird: of all, in fact, which is not pious in the poem.
Tancredi, between Erminia and Clorinda, the one woman adoring him, the other beloved by him--the melancholy graceful modern Tancredi, Tasso's own soul's image--is the veritable hero of the _Gerusalemme_; and by a curious unintended propriety he disappears from the action before the close, without a word.

The force of the poem is spiritualized and concentrated in Clorinda's death, which may be cited as an instance of sublimity in pathos.

It is idyllized in the episode of Erminia among the shepherds, and sensualized in the supreme beauty of Armida's garden.
Rinaldo is second in importance to Tancredi; and Goffredo, on whom Tasso bestows the blare of his Virgilian trumpet from the first line to the last, is poetically of no importance whatsoever.