Vittoria Colonna was not one whose intellectual and moral self had thus abdicated its sceptre. The texture of her mind and its habits of thought forbid the supposition; and, bearing this in mind, it becomes wholly impossible to accept the glorification of her "bel sole," which makes the staple of the first half of her poems, as the sincere expression of genuine feeling and opinion. She was probably about as much in earnest as was her great model and master, Petrarch, in his adoration of Laura. The poetical mode of the day was almost exclusively Petrarchist; and the abounding Castalian fount of that half century in "the land of song" played from its thousand jets little else than Petrarch and water in different degrees of dilution. Vittoria has no claim to be excepted from the "servum pecus," though her imitation has more of self-derived vigour to support it. And this assumption of a mighty, undying, exalted and hopeless passion, was a necessary part of the poet's professional appurtenances. Where could a young and beautiful widow, of unblemished conduct, who had no intention of changing her condition, and no desire to risk misconstruction by the world, find this needful part of her outfit as a poet, so unobjectionably as in the memory of her husband, sanctified and exalted by the imagination to the point proper for the purpose. For want of a deeper spiritual insight, and a larger comprehension of the finer affections of the human heart and the manifestations of them, with the Italian poets of the "rénaissance," love-poetry was little else than the expression of passion in the most restricted sense of the term. But they were often desirous of elevating, purifying, and spiritualising their theme. And how was this to be accomplished? The gratification of passion, such as they painted, would, they felt, have led them quite in a different direction from that they were seeking. A hopeless passion therefore, one whose wishes the reader was perfectly to understand were never destined to be gratified—better still, one by the nature of things impossible to be gratified—this was the contrivance by which love was to be poetised and moralised. The passion-poetry, which addressed itself to the memory of one no more, met the requirements of the case exactly; and Vittoria's ten years despair and lamentations, her apotheosis of the late cavalry captain, and longing to rejoin him, must be regarded as poetical properties brought out for use, when she sat down to make poetry for the perfectly self-conscious, though very laudable purpose of acquiring for herself a poet's reputation.