Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/362

372 mercy in the Clarissa Convent of Borne, where she loved to withdraw herself from the world. It was in Rome, in the year 1563, that she became acquainted with Michael Angelo Buonarotti, and was beloved, and sung of by him as a higher being. That powerful nature which hitherto had loved exclusively the strong, the extraordinary, the Titanic, was moved by her to the love of a higher beauty. His Madonna in his picture of the last Judgment, his three Fates, remind the spectator of the perfectly beautiful and gentle features of Vittoria Colonna. When she died, Michael Angelo stood by her bed, and kissed her hand. “Several days afterwards,” relates his pupil Condivi, “he was quite beside himself, and, as it were frenzied by sorrow, and I remember to have heard him say that nothing grieved him more, than that when he saw her departed from this life he had not kissed her face as he kissed her hand.”

Vittoria Colonna was suspected by many of sympathizing with the Reformer's movement, although there is no positive proof of the fact. But could it, indeed, be otherwise? The noble, ever upward-glancing, ever upward-ascending woman, must herself accept every movement, the object of which was to raise the human spirit nearer to the source of truth. Her life was a romance on a grand scale.

, July 19th.—The Syrens sing no longer, it is said, on the ancient coast and islands of Syrentum, but here it is still thought may be seen traces of their abode. Here I behold at last the soil of Italy, as we, in the north, imagine it to be, full of orange and lemon groves, pomegranates and laurels, and vines,