The acme of pleasure, as conceived by him, is kissing.

Twenty-three of the most inspired stanzas of the eighth canto are allotted to a panegyric of the kiss, in which delight all other amorous delights are drowned.[193] Tasso's melancholy yearning after forbidden fruit is now replaced by satiety contemplating the image of past joys with purring satisfaction.

This quality of self-contented sentiment partly explains why the type of beauty adored is neither womanly nor manly, but adolescent.

It has to be tender, fragile, solicitous, unripe; appealing to sensibility, not to passion, by feminine charms in nerveless and soulless boyhood.

The most distinctive mark of Adonis is that he has no character, no will, no intellect.