This rough and exceedingly obscure sonnet, in which strong feeling has condensed and distorted the language, seems to have been written by a man who has been in love and has been repulsed. The shock has restored him to a momentary realization of the whole experience. He looks at the landscape, and lo! the beauty has dropped out of it. The stream has lost its power, and the meadow its meaning. Summer has stopped. His next thought is: "But it is I who had lent the landscape this beauty. That landscape was myself, my dower, my glory, my birthright," and so he breaks out with "Give me back the light I threw upon you," and so on till the bitter word flung to the woman in the last line. The same clearness of thought and obscurity of expression and the same passion is to be found in the famous sonnet--"_Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto_,"--where he blames himself for not being able to obtain her good-will--as a bad sculptor who cannot hew out the beauty from the rock, although he feels it to be there; and in that heart-breaking one where he says that people may only draw from life what they give to it, and says no good can come to a man who, looking on such great beauty, feels such pain. It is not profitable, nor is it necessary for the comprehension of the poems, to decide to whom or at what period each one was written. There is dispute about some of them as to whether they were addressed to men or women. There is question as to others whether they are prayers addressed to Christ or love poems addressed to Vittoria. In this latter case, perhaps, Michael Angelo did not himself know which they were. Vittoria used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the words are alive in which he mentions her. "I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in return for some of her own religious poems, "I wished, before taking the things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that I might receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own hand. But then, remembering and knowing that the grace of God may not be bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I confess my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall arrive, not because they are in my house, but I myself as being in a house of theirs, shall deem myself in Paradise."