Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/223

 to celebrate such a fête in honour of one who has just been born. You should reserve your gladness for the day on which a man who has lived well dies."

And in the following year he congratulated him on having lost his second son shortly after birth.

Nature, which, through his passionate existence and the peculiar character of his intellectual genius, he had up to then neglected, was a source of consolation to him in his declining years. In September 1556, when fleeing from Rome, which was threatened by the Spanish troops of the Duke of Alba, he passed by Spoleto and there remained five weeks, in the midst of the oak and olive woods, penetrated through and through by the serene splendour of the autumn. It was with regret that he returned to Rome, to which he was recalled at the end of October. "I have left more than half of myself over there," he wrote to Vasari, "for verily peace is to be found only in the woods."

And on returning to Rome the old man of eighty-two composed a beautiful poem to the glory of the fields and