The greater part of his sonnets and canzoni consists, as may be imagined, of love poems. But the individualising characteristics of his poetry save them from the monotony usually inseparable from this style; for where there is no variety of tone, there is a variety of situation and colouring. The lover and poet is with Lorenzo always a disciple of philosophy, and the subject of his poems, decked in all the brilliant colours of fancy, retreats into the background infinitely more than with the great poets of the Trecento. In reading Lorenzo’s poems, one gives little more than a passing thought to Lucrezia Donati, whose name even is revealed to us only by the poet’s friends. Beatrice and Madonna Laura have been the objects of careful historical research—scarcely any one has troubled himself about the fair Florentine, sprung from a race whose name filled the history of the city when that of Medici was still unknown. The reason is not merely that Lucrezia’s bard was no Dante or Petrarca, and that his poetry, however fresh and genuine, and however important as completing a character unique in its way, yet held but a secondary place in the mind and life of Lorenzo de’ Medici; but the ideal creation threatens to swallow up the personality. The story connected with the beautiful girl lying on the bier, in which the poet sets forth how he sought and found a worthy object for his affection, sufficiently indicates that he rather transferred to this object what had already assumed a living shape in his own mind than received his impulse from it. To the greatest of Italy’s poets the angel-bride of his early youth became the ideal in which all his thoughts and feelings were wrapt up; the ideal stood before the eyes of Lorenzo de’ Medici before he knew her whose form he clothed in the magic of spiritualised desire.