Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/96

74 is slackening. In a letter still extant he regrets that when he visited her after death he had kissed her hands only. He made, or set to work to make, a crucifix for her use, and two drawings, perhaps in preparation for it, are now in Oxford. From allusions in the sonnets we may divine that when they first approached each other he had debated much with himself whether this last passion would be the most unsoftening, the most desolating of all—un dolce amaro, un si e no mi muovi; is it carnal affection, or del suo prestino stato—Plato's ante-natal state—il raggio ardente? The older conventional criticism, dealing with the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all, or nearly all the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but Signor Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed on genuine authority. Still there are reasons which make him assign the majority of them to the period between 1542 and 1547, and we may regard the volume as a record of this resting-place in Michelangelo's story. We know how Goethe escaped from the stress of sentiments too strong for him by making a book about them; and for Michelangelo to write down his passionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already in some measure to command and have his way with them;—