Page:The Life of Michael Angelo.djvu/42

 the lower lip slightly protruding. Scanty side-whiskers and a somewhat thin, cloven, faunlike beard, some four or five inches long, enframed his hollow cheeks and protruding cheek-bones.

Sadness and indecision dominated in the ensemble of his physiognomy. It was indeed a face of the days of Tasso—an anxious face, consumed by doubts. His poignant eyes inspired and called for compassion.

Do not let us be sparing with it. Let us hold out to him the love to which he aspired the whole of his life and which was refused him. He experienced the greatest misfortunes which can fall to the lot of man. He saw his country in bondage. He saw Italy delivered for centuries into the hands of barbarians. He saw the death of liberty. He saw those whom he loved disappear one after the other. One after the other he saw all the luminaries of art pass away.

The last of them all, he remained alone in the gathering night. And, on the threshold of death, when he looked behind him, he had not even the consolation of saying that he had accomplished everything he ought, everything he might have done. His life seemed to him to have been wasted. It had been without joy—in vain. In vain he had sacrificed it to the idol of art.

The preternatural work to which he had been condemned during ninety years of life, without a day’s repose or a day of real life, had not even served for the carrying out of a single one of his great projects. Not one of his great works—those which he held most dear—was