“a black cross over Rome.” They struck swiftly and surely and smiled blandly and apparently mercifully; they had the Asiatic notion of morality,--charity, virtue, and the like, combined with a ruthless indifference to them. Power was the thing they craved--power and magnificence; and these were the things they had. But, oh, Florence! Florence! how you taught the nothingness of life itself; its shams; its falsehoods; its atrocities; its uselessness. It has never been any wonder to me that the saddest, darkest, most pathetic figure in all art, Michelangelo Buonarroti, should have appeared and loved and dreamed and labored and died at this time. His melancholy was a fit commentary on his age, on life, and on all art. Oh, Buonarroti, loneliest of figures: I think I understand how it was with you. Bear with me while I lay a flower on this great grave. I cannot think of another instance in art in which indomitable will and almost superhuman energy have been at once so frustrated and so successful. I never think of the great tomb for which the Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli--large, grave, thoughtful; the man who could walk with God--and the slaves in the Louvre were intended without being filled with a vast astonishment and grief to think that life should not have permitted this design to come to fulfilment. To think that a pope so powerful as Julius should have planned a tomb so magnificent, with Michelangelo to scheme it out and actually to begin it, and then never permit it to reach completion. All the way northward through Italy this idea of a parallelogram with forty figures on it and covered with reliefs and other ornaments haunted me. At Florence, in the Belle Arti, I saw more of the figures (casts), designed for this tomb--strange, unfolding thoughts half-hewn out of the rock, which suggest the source from which Rodin has drawn his inspiration,--and my astonishment grew. Before I was out of Italy, this man and his genius, the mere dreams of the things he hoped to do, enthralled me so that to me he has become the one great art figure of the world. Colossal is the word for Michelangelo,--so vast that life was too short for him to suggest even a tithe of what he felt. But even the things that he did, how truly monumental they are.