We feel that religious emotion is feeble here, and that the classical enthusiasm of the Renaissance is on the point of expiring in those Latinistic artifices.

Yet the interwoven romance contains a something difficult to analyze, intangible and evanescent--_un non so che_, to use the poet's favorite phrase--which riveted attention in the sixteenth century, and which harmonizes with our own sensibility to beauty.

Tasso, in one word, was the poet, not of passion, not of humor, not of piety, not of elevated action, but of that new and undefined emotion which we call Sentiment.

Unknown to the ancients, implicit in later mediaeval art, but not evolved with clearness from romance, alien to the sympathies of the Renaissance as determined by the Classical Revival, sentiment, that _non so che_ of modern feeling, waited for its first apocalypse in Tasso's work.

The phrase which I have quoted, and which occurs so frequently in this poet's verse, indicates the intrusion of a new element into the sphere of European feeling.