Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/129

 1531. Supreme irony! Nobody understood them. A Giovanni Strozzi, seeing the formidable "Night," composed such epigrams as the following:

"Night, whom you see so sweetly sleeping in this stone, was by an Angel carved, and since she sleeps, she lives: if you believe me not, awake her, and she will speak."

Michael Angelo replied:

"Sleep is dear to me, but dearer still to me it is to be a stone, while shame is shameless and while crimes bear sway. To neither see nor hear is my good fortune, therefore rouse me not, but speak low."

"Is all heaven deep in slumber," he cries in another poem, "since a single being has appropriated the wealth of so many men?"

And the enslaved Florence replies to his moans:

"Be not troubled in your holy thoughts. He who