Contrary to the Orlando Furioso, the story of Jerusalem Delivered, is a simple one. Yet the main plot, i. e., the military operations of Godfrey, the various battles, and the final capture of Jerusalem, are not so effective or interesting as the various romantic episodes introduced from time to time; the reader to-day is disposed to hurry over the early cantos and to linger over the beautiful pages which tell the loves of Tancred and Clorinda, Olindo and Sophronia, Rinaldo, Armida, and Erminia.
The poem begins with the usual invocation:
I sing the pious arms and Chief, who freed
The Sepulcher of Christ from thrall profane:
Much did he toil in thought, and much in deed;
Much in the glorious enterprise sustain;
And hell in vain opposed him; and in vain
Afric and Asia to the rescue poured
Their mingled tribes;—Heaven recompensed his pain,
And from all fruitless sallies of the sword,
True to the Red-Cross flag his wandering friends restored.
O, thou, the Muse, that not with fading palms
Circlest thy brows on Pindus, but among
The Angels warbling their celestial psalms,
Hast for thy coronal a golden throng
Of everlasting stars! make thou my song
Lucid and pure; breathe thou the flame divine
Into my bosom; and forgive the wrong,
If with grave truth light fiction I combine,
And sometimes grace my page with other flowers than thine.
The poet then plunges into the midst of the action, We learn how the Christian army has been in Holy Land for six years and had made many conquests:
Six summers now were past, since in the East
Their high Crusade the Christians had begun;
And Nice by storm, and Antioch had they seized
By secret guile, and gallantly when won,
Held in defiance of the myriads dun,
Prest to its conquest by the Persian king;
Tortosa sacked, when now the sullen sun
Entered Aquarius, to breme winter's wing
The quartered hosts give place, and wait the coming spring.
In the spring of the seventh year the archangel Gabriel appears to Godfrey of Bouillon and orders him to assemble the chiefs of the army and prepare for a new and vigorous prosecution of the war. Godfrey obeys and is himself elected commander-in-chief. Then, after a review of the troops, which furnishes the poet an opportunity of giving a catalogue of the various Christian forces (after the manner of Homer), the whole army starts for Jerusalem.
The scene then changes to the Holy City itself, where King Aladine and his followers are seized with consternation at the news of the advance of the Christians. We now see the first of the famous episodes of the Jerusalem Delivered. The Magician Ismeno urges the king to seize a certain image of the Virgin Mary and shut it up in the royal mosque (thus converting it into a palladium for Jerusalem). The king does so; but immediately the image disappears from the mosque. Aladine is wild with rage and being unable to discover the perpetrator of the outrage, resolves to destroy all the Christians in the city. Now there was in the city a beautiful Christian girl:
Of generous thoughts and principles sublime,
Amongst them in the city lived a maid.
The flower of virgins, in her ripest prime,
Supremely beautiful! but that she made
Never her care, or beauty only weighed
In worth with virtue; and her worth acquired
A deeper charm from blooming in the shade;
Lovers she shunned, nor loved to be admired.
But from their praises turned, and lived a life retired.
Although she was unconscious of love herself, there was a noble Christian youth, Olindo, who had long loved her in secret. Sophronia resolves to save her people. She makes her way to the king's palace, and declares that she alone is guilty of having stolen the sacred image from the mosque.