33).
Immense solitudini d'arena (xvii.

I).
The last of these lines presents an impressive landscape in three melodious words.
These verbal and stylistic criticisms are not meant to cast reproach on Tasso as a poet.

If they have any value, it is the light they throw upon conditions under which the poet was constrained to work.

Humanism and the Catholic Revival reduced this greatest genius of his age to the necessity of clothing religious sentiments in scholastic phraseology, with the view of attaining to epic grandeur.

But the Catholic Revival was no regeneration of Christianity from living sources; and humanism had run its course in Italy, and was ending in the sands of critical self-consciousness.