Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/216

198 I, plumeless, yet upon your pinions flee; When heaven I seek, your soul conducts me there; Blushes or pallor at your will I wear; Sun chills and winter warms at your decree. The fashion of your will prescribeth mine; My thought hath in your thinking taken birth; My speech gives voice to your discourse unspoken. A sunless moon that by herself would shine, I were without you; only seen on earth By light of sun that on her dark hath broken."

The roughness of Michael Angelo's verse was planed down by the first editor, his great-nephew, and the true text has only been retrieved in our time.

Two religious poets stand aloof from the class of Petrarchists, rather by the nature of their themes than the quality of their talent. , a religious poet of Protestant tendencies, produced a hymn to the Almighty which ranks among the best canzoni of the period, and had anticipated Coleridge's project, which with him as with Coleridge remained a project, for a series of similar compositions. , Bishop of Chioggia, is in general a tame versifier, but in two inspired moments produced two of the most beautiful sonnets in the language: one of which is remarkable for expressing in an ornate style the thought of Heine's famous lyric, "Mein Herz gleicht ganz dem Meere"; the other, apart from its great beauty, as an instance of a sonnet which, beginning apparently in a commonplace style, is vivified through and through by the last tercet:

Never with such delight the bee in spring, When the full mead teems with the novel flower, The sweetness of the honey-burdened bower Amasses for her cell in wayfaring;