In La Araucana, as in the Gerusalemme liberata, readers would be able to enjoy the lively account of terrifying and courageous battles; they would find a defence and illustration of political virtues, and a censorship of their opposites. But they would also find poetry in accordance with their sensitivity: a lyric way of exalting human passions beyond or even against political and religious reasons.However, in either case, the hard-won balance, the miraculous equilibrium of the masterwork, proved to be fragile. Most readers of both poets retained only one side of the mixture of epic grandeur, lyric charm, and tragic pathos offered by these works. Some of Ercilla’s readers, such as his Dutch translator, scoured his work for geographic and historical data with pragmatic aims. However, most preferred heroines and love stories. 64 Similarly, a majority of the many admirers of the Gerusalemme liberata retained the amorous laments of Armida, Tancredi, or Erminia, which would be extensively developed in the elegiac and operatic posterity of the poem. Faced with such a universal misunderstanding, Tasso would renounce his own masterpiece and construct a kind of palinodia, the Conquistata. Likewise, Ercilla imbued his account with a sinister ending, suspending his poem on a dissonant note of repentant melancholy.