"I fear," he says, "to draw from the marble, instead of her image, that of my features worn, and void of grace."--(_Madrigale 22._ ) And when he drew near the term of his labour--"Behold," he exclaims, "an animated stone, which, a thousand years hence, will seem to breathe! What, then, ought heaven to do for her, its own work, while the portrait only is mine; for her whom the whole world, and not myself alone, regard as a goddess rather than a mortal? Nevertheless the stone remains, while she is about to depart."--(_Madrigale 39._) It was probably on this occasion that Michel Angelo wrote those charming, and mysterious verses, whose sense it is otherwise difficult to determine:- "Qui risi e piansi, e con doglia infinita, Da questo sasso vidi far partita Colei ch 'a me mi tolse, e non mi volse." (_Sonnetto 29._) The bust of Luigia de' Medici, if it really came from the hands of Angelo, has shared the fate of many other _chefs-d'oeuvres_, of which his contemporaries appear to have spoken with such great enthusiasm, only to increase our regret; while the most diligent researches have led to no recovery since their disappearance, caused by the disasters that visited Florence, and by the culpable negligence which, throughout the whole of Italy, followed the period of which Buonarotti was the principal ornament. If it be to the affection of Luigia de' Medici that Angelo's nineteenth sonnet[55] really refers, we are led to the belief that this lofty soul, temperate in its own hopes, yet imbued with a generous ambition, had suffered itself, for a moment, to be carried away by the illusion of a permanent happiness; but a blow, as terrible as unforeseen, scattered these thoughts. The "Magnificent" Lorenzo, scarcely in his forty-second year, sunk at his seat of Careggi, under a short illness, but of which he foresaw the inevitable term with great resignation from the earliest moment. With Lorenzo de' Medici descended to the tomb all that was yet bright in the glory of his family--all that was real in the prosperity of Florence--all that was assured in the fortune, or attractive in the labours of the young Buonarotti, then only seventeen years of age.