The graceful poets who thus tuned their harps to the notes of Petrarch sang within the hearing of a spirit of another sort, whose verses, had they known them, they would have compared unfavourably with their own elegance, but whose appearance in their circle would have been like that of Victor Hugo’s Pan at the banquet of the Olympians. MICHAEL ANGELO, the greatest Italian after Dante, had not, like Dante, acquired the secret of poetic form. He indites as on marble with mallet and chisel; but the inscription is everlasting. “Ungrammatical, rude in versification, crabbed or obscure in thought,” as Symonds describes them, Michael Angelo’s sonnets are yet priceless as a revelation of the man, more distinct than that vouchsafed by his painting or sculpture. These tell of his tremendous force; the deep springs of tenderness in his nature are only to be learned from the poems, the most important of which are consecrated to Love, now ideal and impersonal, now expending itself upon some fair object, masculine or feminine, but in either case Platonic. Vittoria Colonna and Tommmaso de’ Cavalieri are the objects of the poet’s deepest attachment. The following sonnet was most probably inscribed to Cavalieri: _By your eyes’ aid a gentle light I see, Which but for these mine own would never share; By your auxiliar feet a load I bear Which my lame limbs refuse to bear for me. I, plumeless, yet upon your pinions flee; When heaven I seek, your soul conducts me there; Blushes or pallor at your will I wear; Sun chills and winter warms at your decree. The fashion of your will prescribeth mine; My thought hath in your thinking taken birth; My speech gives voice to your discourse unspoken. A sunless moon that by herself would shine, I were without you; only seen on earth By light of sun that on her dark hath broken._ The roughness of Michael Angelo’s verse was planed down by the first editor, his great-nephew, and the true text has only been retrieved in our time. Two religious poets stand aloof from the class of Petrarchists, rather by the nature of their themes than the quality of their talent. CELIO MAGNO, a religious poet of Protestant tendencies, produced a hymn to the Almighty which ranks among the best canzoni of the period, and had anticipated Coleridge’s project, which with him as with Coleridge remained a project, for a series of similar compositions. GABRIELE FIAMMA, Bishop of Chioggia, is in general a tame versifier, but in two inspired moments produced two of the most beautiful sonnets in the language: one of which is remarkable for expressing in an ornate style the thought of Heine’s famous lyric, “Mein Herz gleicht ganz dem Meere”; the other, apart from its great beauty, as an instance of a sonnet which, beginning apparently in a commonplace style, is vivified through and through by the last tercet: