This, in Guarini's hands, becomes:
Quell'augellin, che canta
Si dolcemente, e lascivetto vola
Or dall'abete al faggio,
Ed or dal faggio al mirto,
S'avesse umano spirto,
Direbbe: Ardo d'amore, ardo d'amore.
Here a laborious effort of the constructive fancy has been substituted for a single flash of sympathetic imagination. Tasso does not doubt that the nightingale is pouring out her love in song. Guarini says that if the bird had human soul, it would exclaim, Ardo d'amore. Tasso sees it flying from branch to branch. Guarini teases our sense of mental vision by particularizing pine and beech and myrtle. The same is true of Linco's speech in general when compared with Dafne's on the ruling power of love in earth and heaven.
Of imagination in the true sense of the term Guarini had none. Of fancy, dwelling gracefully, ingeniously, suggestively, upon externals he had plenty. The minute care with which he worked out each vein of thought and spun each thread of sentiment, was that of the rhetorician rather than the poet. Tasso had made Aminta say:
La semplicetta Silvia
Pietosa del mio male,
S'offri di dar aita
Alla finta ferita, ahi lassole fece
Più cupa, e più mortale
La mia piaga verace,
Quando le labbra sue
Giunse alle labbra mie.
Nè l'api d'alcun fiore
Colgan si dolce il sugo,
Come fa dolce il mel, ch'allora io colsi
Da quelle fresche rose.
Now listen to Guarini's Mirtillo:
Amor si stava, Ergasto,
Com'ape suol, nelle due fresche rose
Di quelle labbra ascoso;
E mentre ella si stette
Con la baciata bocca
Al baciar della mia
Immobile e ristretta,
La dolcezza del mel sola gustai;
Ma poichè mi s'offerse anch'ella, e porse
L'una e l'altra dolcissima sua rosa....
This is enough to illustrate Guarini's laborious method of adding touch to touch without augmenting th force of the picture.[184] We find already here the transition from Tasso's measured art to the fantastic prolixity of Marino. And though Guarini was upon the whole chaste in use of language, his rhetorical love of amplification and fanciful refinement not unfrequently betrayed him into Marinistic conceits. Dorinda, for instance, thus addresses Silvio (act iv. sc. 9):
O bellissimo scoglio
Già dall'onda e dal vento
Delle lagrime mie, de'miei sospiri
Si spesso invan percosso!
Sighs are said to be (act i. sc. 2):