Page:Studies in the history of the renaissance (IA studiesinhistor01pategoog).djvu/97

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It was just because Vittoria raised no great passion that the space in his life where she reigns has such peculiar suavity; and the spirit of the sonnets is lost if we once take them out of that dreamy atmosphere in which men have things as they will, because the hold of all outward things upon them is faint and thin. Their prevailing tone is a calm and meditative sweetness. The cry of distress is indeed there, but as a mere residue, a trace of bracing chalybeate salt, just discernible in the song which rises as a clear sweet spring from a charmed space in his life.

This charmed and temperate space in Michelangelo's life, without which its excessive strength would have been so imperfect, which saves him from the judgment of Dante on those who wilfully lived in sadness, is a well-defined period there, reaching from the year 1542 to the year 1547, the year of Vittoria's death. In it, the life-long effort to tranquillise his vehement emotions by withdrawing them into the region of ideal sentiment becomes successful; and the significance of Vittoria in it, is that she realises for him a type of affection which even in disappointment may charm and sweeten his spirit. In this effort to tranquillise and sweeten life by idealising its