There is one, however, who calls for more attention, not only because of her enduring fame, but because she stood in a light so strong as to make her, even at this distance, a living personality to us; also because she represents the best phases of the Renaissance, its learning, its intelligence, its enthusiasm, its subtle Platonism, combined with a profound religious faith and a trace of the mysticism of a simpler age. We are apt to recall Vittoria Colonna as half poet, half saint. Her spiritual face looks out of a century of vice and license, crowned with the delicate halo of a Madonna brooding tenderly over the sins of the world in which she lives with an air of apartness, as if she were in it but not of it. Whether we see her under the soft skies of Ischia, happy and a bride, or seeking solace among its orange-scented groves for the lost joys of her youth; at Naples, holding a lettered court with the beautiful and accomplished Giulia Gonzaga; at Rome, talking on high themes with a group of serious and thoughtful men in the cool shadows of the Colonna gardens; at Ferrara, discussing the new thought, receiving the homage of a distinguished circle, and generously using her great name to shield the persecuted and unhappy; or kneeling at prayers and chanting Misereres in the cloisters where, at intervals, she hid a sorrowful heart--there is always the same flavor of purity and saintliness in her character and personality as in her genius. The romance of her life is well known. She was born in 1490,--just before Lorenzo de’ Medici died and Savonarola expiated the crime of being too good for his time,--in a gloomy old Colonna castle that towers picturesquely above the rambling, medieval town of Marino among the Alban hills. But she did not stay there long, as she was betrothed at four to the Marquis of Pescara, and, for some inexplicable reason, sent away to the sunny island of Ischia to be educated with him by his sister Costanza d’Avalos, Duchess of Francavilla, a woman so noted for wisdom, ability, and virtue that she was made governor, or châtelaine, of the island at her husband’s death. For once, this commercial arrangement proved a fortunate one, as the brilliant duchess was as famous for her culture and the lettered society gathered about her as for her practical talent in ruling. The gifted child grew up among poets and men of learning, with her future lord as her playmate and a woman of intellect as her guide. Add to this the changing splendors of sea and sky, the haunting memories of the beautiful shore that curves away from the headlands of Misenum to the Isles of the Sirens, the repose broken only by the cool dripping of fountains, the plashing of the indolent waves on the beach, and the plaintive songs of the boatmen floating at evening across the tranquil water to find a sweet refrain in the music of the vesper bell--and we have the _milieu_ of the poet. There were royal festivities when the king came to break