It is no marvel then if a connection, such as prevails between hills and valleys, seems to run between these lesser works, the odes, the verses of the satires, and the _Furioso._ It is sufficient to read an octave or two of the poem to discover at once the difference in altitude separating it from the most delicious of the love-songs, from the most nimble and picturesque of the satires, which express the feelings of the author far more directly than does the _Furioso._ It is further to be noted that Ariosto never wished to publish, and certainly never would have had published a great number of them, with the exception of the comedies, even after his death, except perhaps the satires; but since the minor works are nevertheless the expression of his feelings in real and ordinary life, it follows that if we wish to discover the inspiration of the _Furioso,_ the passion which informed and gave to it its proper content, we must seek for this beyond his ordinary life, not in the heart which we know as that of a son, a brother, a poor man, a lover: it is something hidden yet more deeply within him, the heart of his heart. That there really was a hidden affection; that Ariosto really had a heart of his heart shut up within himself; that beyond and above the beloved woman he worshipped another woman or goddess, with whom he daily held religious converse, is apparent from his whole habit of life. Why had he so lofty a disdain for practical ambitions, why was life at court and business so wearisome to him, why did he renounce so much, sigh so often and so often pray for leisure and rest and freedom, save to celebrate that cult, to give himself over to that converse, to work upon the _Furioso,_ which was its altar, or the statue which he had sculptured for it and was perfecting with his chisel? What was the origin of his well-known "distraction," that mind of his so aloof from his surroundings, ever dwelling upon something else, which his contemporaries observe and about which curious anecdotes are preserved? His need of love and of feminine caresses did not present itself to him as a supreme end, as with people desirous of ease and pleasure, but seemed to him to be rather a means to an end: as though it were the surrounding of serene joy, of tumult appeased, which he prepared for himself and for that other more lofty love. Carducci has successfully defined this psychological situation in his sonnet on the portrait of Ariosto, where he says that the only longed for and accepted "prize for his poems" was for the great dreamer "a lovely mouth--which should appease the burning of his Apollonian brow--with kisses ..."