Michel Angelo was made of sterner stuff than this. His temper was violent, his bearing haughty, his character impetuous. He had none of the personal graces of his great rival. His face was, as it were, hammered sternly out by fate; his brow corrugated by care, his cheeks worn by thought, his hair and beard stiffly curled and bull-like; his expression sad and intense, with a weary longing in his deep-set eyes. Doubtless, at times, they flamed with indignation and passion—for he was very irascible, and suffered no liberties to be taken with him. He could not “sport with Amaryllis in the shade, or with the tangles of Neæra’s hair.” Art was his mistress, and a stern mistress she was, urging him ever onward to greater heights. He loved her with a passion of the intellect; there was nothing he would not sacrifice for her. He was willing to be poor, almost to starve, to labor with incessant zeal, grudging even the time that sleep demanded, only to win her favor. He could not have been a pleasant companion, and he was never a lover of woman. His friendship with Vittoria Colonna was worlds away from the senses,—worlds away from such a connection as that of Raffaelle with the Fornarina. They walked together in the higher fields of thought and feeling, in the region of ideas and aspirations. Their conversation was of art, and poesy, and religion, and the mysteries of life. They read to each other their poems, and discoursed on high themes of religion, and fate, and foreknowledge. The sonnets he addressed to her were in no trivial vein of human passion or sentiment. “Rapt above earth” (he writes) “by power of one fair face, Hers, in whose sway alone my heart delights, I mingle with the Blest on those pure heights Where man, yet mortal, rarely finds a place— With Him who made the Work that Work accords So well that, by its help and through His grace, I raise my thoughts, inform my deeds and words, Clasping her beauty in my soul’s embrace.” In his _soul’s_ embrace, not in his arms. When he stood beside her dead body, he silently gazed at her, not daring to imprint a kiss on that serene brow even when life had departed. If he admired Petrarca, it was as a philosopher and a patriot,—for his canzone to Liberty, not for his sonnets to Laura. Dante, whom he called _Stella di alto valor_, the star of high power, was his favorite poet; Savonarola his single friend. The “Divina Commedia,” or rather the “Inferno” alone, he thought worthy of illustration by his pencil; the doctrines of the latter he warmly espoused. “True beauty,” says that great reformer, “comes only from the soul, from nobleness of spirit and purity of conduct.” And so, in one of his madrigals, says Michel Angelo. “They are but gross spirits who seek in sensual nature the beauty that uplifts and moves every healthy intelligence even to heaven.”