Yet I venture to remark that Marino only at rare intervals attains to purity of poetic style; even his best passages are deformed, not merely by conceits to which the name of _Marinism_ has been given, but also by gross vulgarities and lapses into trivial prose.
Notwithstanding this want of distinction, however, he has a melody that never fails.

The undulating, evenly on-flowing _cantilena_ of his verbal music sustains the reader on a tide of song.

That element of poetry, which, as I have observed, was developed with remarkable success by Tasso in some parts of the _Gerusalemme_ is the main strength of the _Adone_.

With Marino the _Chant d'Amour_ never rises so high, thrills so subtly, touches the soul so sweetly and so sadly, as it does in Tasso's verse.

But in all those five thousand octave stanzas it is rarely altogether absent.