During the fourteen years which elapsed since its completion, the poet's youthful fervor had been gradually fading out.

Inspiration yielded to criticism; piety succeeded to sentiment and enthusiasm for art.

Therefore, in this later phase of his maturity, with powers impaired by prolonged sufferings and wretched health, tormented by religious scruples and vague persistent fear, he determined to eliminate the romance from the epic, to render its unity of theme more rigorous, and to concentrate attention upon the serious aspects of the subject.
The result of this plan, pursued through five years of wandering, was the _Gerusalemme Conquistata_, a poem which the world has willingly let die, in which the style of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_ is worsened, and which now serves mainly to establish by comparison the fact that what was immortal in Tasso's art was the romance he ruthlessly rooted out.

A further step in this transition from art to piety is marked by the poem upon the Creation of the World, called _Le Sette Giornate_.

Written in blank verse, it religiously but tamely narrates the operation of the Divine Artificer, following the first chapter of Genesis and expanding the motive of each of the seven days with facile rhetoric.