Before such words and images as these, De Sanctis used to say to his pupils, when explaining to them the _Furioso_: "See how much heart Ariosto had!" But he always kept telling them this truth also: that "Ariosto never pushes situations to the point of painfulness," forbidden to him by the tone of his poetry; and he used to show them how Ariosto used sometimes to make use of interruptions, sometimes of graceful similitudes, or reflections, or devices of style, in order to restrain the painfulness ready to break through. Those critics who for instance are shocked by the octaves on the name of "Isabella" are too exigent, or ask too much, and what they ought not to ask (this name of Isabella was destined by God to adorn beautiful, noble, courteous, chaste and wise women from this time forth, and was originally intended as homage from Ariosto to the Marchesana of Mantua, Isabella of Este). With these octaves he concludes the narrative of the sacrifice of her life made by Isabella to keep faith with Zerbino; they do not understand that those octaves and the _Proficiscere_ which precedes them ("Go thou in peace, thou blessed soul") and the very account of the drunken bestiality of Rodomonte, and prior to that, the semi-comic scene of the saintly hermit who presides over the virtue of Isabella, "like a practised mariner and is quite prepared to offer her speedily a sumptuous meal of spiritual food," the hermit whom Rodomonte seizes by the neck and throws three miles into the sea, are all words and representations so accentuated as to produce the effect of allowing Isabella to die without plunging the _Furioso_ into tragedy with its correspondingly tragical catharsis; for the _Furioso_ has its own general and perpetually harmonious catharsis, which we have now made sufficiently clear. It is precisely owing to the action of this sentimental and passionate material, in spite of and through its effectual surpassing, that the varied colouring arising from it enters the poem and confers upon it that character of humanity, which led us to declare at the outset of our analysis that when we define Ariosto as the _Poet of Harmony,_ we proposed only to indicate where the _accent_ of his work falls, but that he is the poet of Harmony and also of something else, of harmony developed in a particular world of sentiments, and in fact that the harmony to which Ariosto attains, is not harmony in general, but an _altogether Ariostesque Harmony._ [Footnote 1: Tempestuous seas and haunting fear which had kept her waking for days now gave place to a feeling of security: deep in the forest and removed from care and noise, Olympia clasped her lover to her breast and fell into sleep as deep as that of bears and dormice.]