His book of poems is filled with an unspeakable longing for the perfection of earthly beauty and for eternity; and his beloved mistress is the sole symbol of this metaphysical climax. Earthly beauty is but an imperfect semblance of the divine beauty, the embodiment of which is his love. We meet all the familiar motives; he is nothing before her; he is unworthy of existence; he is like the moon receiving her light from the sun; love has raised him from his base condition and is teaching him the futility of all he had hitherto valued. Yea, well I see what folly 'twere to think That largess dropped from thee like dews from heaven Could ever be paid by work so frail as mine. (_Transl. by_ J.A. SYMONDS.) And of love he says: From loftiest stars shoots down a radiance all their own, Drawing the soul above, And such, we say, is love. (_Transl. by_ HARFORD.) His poems, which would proclaim him a great poet if he were not an even greater sculptor, breathe an emotion unsurpassed in its intensity. They reveal to us in an almost unique manner the emotional process which culminated in the deification of the beloved. If we did not know that Vittoria Colonna was an historical individual, not much younger than Michelangelo himself, and (if we are to credit her portrait) a very plain woman with a large masculine nose, we might be tempted to believe her to be a mythical personage like Beatrice Portinari, or Margaret in _Faust_. But the conviction that all true perfection was centred only in her, now faced his art and threw its terrible shadow over it.