The disciple of the Platonic philosophy, giving a description of his beloved one in the commentary on his sonnets,[2] thus declares himself in his definition of the nature of love. ‘Whoever seeks the true definition of love, will find that it consists in the desire for beauty. This being so, whatever is ugly repels him who truly and worthily loves. The beauty of the countenance and soul of our beloved one impels us to seek beauty in other things; to rise to that virtue which is beauty on earth as in heaven, and to reach at length the highest beauty—the Divinity, our final goal and resting-place. The necessary conditions of a true, worthy, and elevated love, appear to me to be two: first, that the object shall be one, then that the love shall be constant. It is not given to all to fulfil these conditions, seeing that but few women possess the lofty power of attaching men so entirely to themselves that they shall never offend against the two conditions without which there is no true love.’ But his philosophical view of life and human happiness is contained in a longer poem in terza rima, (‘L’Altercazione’), in which Marsilio Ficino is personally introduced as teacher, and decides between the poet and his interlocutor. The former has left the tumult of the city, the confusion of party politics, the throng of the market, to bring his soul to a haven of rest, a life free and secure from anxiety, in the solitude of the country. He describes what he seeks and hopes to find in this retreat to the shepherd whom he meets; the latter points out to him the toils and troubles of his humble lot, and how he drags on day after day beneath ever-renewing cares. Then Marsilio comes to place in their true light the worth and the worthlessness of sublunary things; to show how happiness depends neither on the high position of the one nor the lowly station of the other, but is to be found in the knowledge and love of the Author of all things. As may be seen from this sketch of its contents, the poem contains nothing original, but it is pleasing from its life-like description of contrasts, and interesting as a token of the earnest self-introspection of a richly and variously endowed mind.[3]