Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/215

Rh Three hundred Fabii gave immortal name To ancient Tiber; what to Spain by death Heroic of three thousand shall be given? Greater the host, more excellent the aim Of warrior martyrs; those their dying breath Resigned to Italy, and these to heaven."

The graceful poets who thus tuned their harps to the notes of Petrarch sang within the hearing of a spirit of another sort, whose verses, had they known them, they would have compared unfavourably with their own elegance, but whose appearance in their circle would have been like that of Victor Hugo's Pan at the banquet of the Olympians. , the greatest Italian after Dante, had not, like Dante, acquired the secret of poetic form. He indites as on marble with mallet and chisel; but the inscription is everlasting. "Ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed or obscure in thought," as Symonds describes them, Michael Angelo's sonnets are yet priceless as a revelation of the man, more distinct than that, vouchsafed by his painting or sculpture. These tell of his tremendous force; the deep springs of tenderness in his nature are only to be learned from the poems, the most important of which are consecrated to Love, now ideal and impersonal, now expending itself upon some fair object, masculine or feminine, but in either case Platonic. Vittoria Colonna and Tommaso de' Cavalieri are the objects of the poet's deepest attachment. The following sonnet was most probably inscribed to Cavalieri:

By your eyes' aid a gentle light I see, Which but for these mine own would never share; By your auxiliar feet a load I bear Which my lame limbs refuse to bear for me.