_Of Icarus and Phaethon hast read? Thou’lt know how one was in these waters whirled, When he with orient light would wake the world, And with sun’s fire endiadem his head; That other in the sea, when, rashly spread, His waxen wings he voyaging unfurled; So headlong evermore the man be hurled Who ways divine with mortal foot would tread. But who shall quake in difficult emprise If Gods attend him? What is not allowed To Love, who knits in one all things divine? Forsaking heavenly spheres that sing and shine, By him Diana to a shepherd bowed, And Ida’s youth was rapt unto the skies._ Neither Tasso nor Leonora, however, was of an amorous temperament; and there is no reason to suppose that he experienced any great difficulty in keeping his passion within Platonic bounds. The hidden flame may well have wrought him to the production of his unsurpassed _Aminta_ in 1572-73. But in 1574 a severe illness marks an era in his life; he is never again quite the same man. In 1575 we encounter the first decided symptoms of an unsettled mind in querulousness and morbid suspicion, augmented, we may well believe, by the vexations attendant upon the revision of his now completed epic. He thought, and with justice, that he had written a truly religious poem, and he now found the ecclesiastical reaction demanding by the mouth of Silvio Antoniano, a type of the Roman Catholic Puritan of that ungenial day, that it should be adapted to the reading of monks and nuns. Solerti, his chief modern biographer, seems inclined to consider “his two years’ warfare with bigotry and pedantry” the principal cause of his insanity; Carducci rather accuses his Jesuit education. Both were actual causes, more potent and malignant than his sentimental attachment to Leonora; but in truth the germ of insanity had always been latent in his brain, and the special occasion of its manifestation was comparatively immaterial.