"No, it is not always a mortal and impious fault to burn with an immense love for a perfect beauty, if this love afterwards leave the heart so softened that the arrows of divine beauty may penetrate it." "Love wakens the soul, and lends it wings for its sublime flight: often its ardour is the first step by which, discontented with earth, the soul remounts towards her Creator."--(_Sonnet_ 8.) Transported with this thought, in which he feels the passion to which he has yielded at once transforming and tranquillising itself, Michel Angelo gives to it in his verses the most eloquent and most ingenious developments. "No, it is not a mortal thing which my eyes perceived, when in them was reflected, for the first time, the light of thine; but in thy look, my soul, inquiet, because it mounts towards its object without repose, has conceived the hope of finding her peace." "She ascends, stretching her wings towards the abode from whence she descended! The beauty which charms the eyes calls to her on her flight; but, finding her weak and fugitive, she passes onwards to the universal form, the divine archetype." This expression, and many others dispersed throughout the collection, show that he had profited more than he cared to acknowledge by the discourses of the Platonic Academy. "Yes, I perceive it; that which must die can offer no repose to the wise man. * * * That which kills the soul is not love; it is the unbridled disorder of the senses. Love can render our souls perfect here below, and yet more in heaven!"--(_Sonnet_ 2.) And fruther on: "From the stars most near to the empyrean, descends sometimes a brightness which attracts our desires towards them: it is that which is called love!"--(_Mad._ 8.) But this celestial route demands extraordinary efforts on the part of him who aspires to travel it: "How rash and how unworthy are the understandings, which bring down to the level of the senses this beauty whose approaches aid the true intelligence to remount to the skies. But feeble eyes cannot go from the mortal to the divine;[58] never will they raise themselves to that throne, where, without the grace from on high, it is a vain thought to think of rising." Michel Angelo believed that he recognised these characteristics, as rare as sublime, in the love which pervaded his own heart. "The life of my love is not the all in my heart. * * This affection turns to that point where no earthly weakness, no guilty thought, could exist." "Love, when my soul left the presence of her Creator, made of her a pure eye, of thee a splendour, and my ardent desire finds it every hour in that which must, alas! one day die of thee."