Page:Amyntas, a tale of the woods; from the Italien of Torquato Tasso (IA amyntastaleofwoo00tass).pdf/31

 tion I could not help feeling now and then a yearning out of the pale of the original for the more imaginative and sylvan wealth of Milton and Fletcher, my enthusiasm grew more and more absorbed in Tasso alone. The nature, as it always does when it is powerful, sufficed. Even the undoubted and ancient common-places, which are to be found here and there,—such as at the end, for instance, of the First Scene, Act the Third,—appeared nothing more than chalky pieces of baldness, over which you pass quickly upon the grass again, And it is to be said for those common-places, that they were not the school-boy things they are now. The pastorals of the ancients had not been thumbed as they have been since; the artificial taste of the court-critics, which could enjoy the exordium of Beccari's Sacrifizio, rendered some of the worst things in the Latin poets