No poet perhaps ever owed so much to female influence as Tasso, or wrote so much under the intoxicating inspiration of love and beauty. He paid most dearly for such inspiration; and yet not _too_ dearly. The high tone of sentiment, the tenderness, and the delicacy which pervade all his poems, which prevail even in his most voluptuous descriptions, and which give him such a decided superiority over Ariosto, cannot be owing to any change of manners or increase of refinement produced by the lapse of a few years. It may be traced to the tender influence of two elegant women. He for many years read the cantos of the Gerusalemme, as he composed them, to the Princesses Lucretia and Leonora, both of whom he admired--one of whom he adored. _Au reste_--the kiss, which he is said to have imprinted on the lips of Leonora in a transport of frenzy, as well as the idea that she was the primary cause of his insanity, and of his seven years' imprisonment at St. Anne's, rest on no authority worthy of credit; yet it is not less certain that she was the object of his secret and fervent admiration, and that this hopeless passion conspired, with many other causes, to fever his irritable temperament and unsettle his imagination, beyond that "fine madness," which we are told _ought_ "to possess the poet's brain." When Tasso first visited Ferrara, in 1565, he was just one-and-twenty, with all the advantages which a fine countenance, a majestic figure, (for he was tall even among the tallest,) noble birth, and excelling talents could bestow: he was already distinguished as the author of the Rinaldo, his earliest poem, in which he had celebrated (as if prophetically,) the Princesses d'Este--and chiefly Leonora. Lucrezia Estense, e l'altra i cui crin d'oro, Lacci e reti saran del casto amore.[120]