Back she then went to Ischia, where they had passed those earlier days together, and there, for seven years almost without interruption, she spent her time thinking of the dead lord of Pescara, and extolling him in her verse. Still young and beautiful, it was but natural that her grief might be controlled in time and that she might again find happiness in married life. Distinguished princes pleaded with her in vain, and even her brothers urged her to this course, which, under the circumstances, they considered entirely within the bounds of propriety; but to them all she gave the calm assurance that her noble husband, though dead to others, was still alive for her and constantly in her thoughts. After the first period of her grief had passed, she found herself much drawn toward spiritual and religious thoughts, and then it was that her poetry became devotional in tone and sacred subjects were now her only inspiration. Roscoe mentions the fact that she was at this time suspected of sympathizing in secret with the reformed doctrines in religion which were then making such headway in the North and playing such havoc with the papal interests, but there seems little ground for this suspicion beyond the fact that her devotion to the things of the spirit and her somewhat austere ideas in regard to manners and morals were in that day so unusual as to call forth comment. This sacred verse was published in a volume entitled _Rime spirituali_, and Guingene is authority for the statement that no other author before Vittoria Colonna had ever published a volume of poetry devoted exclusively to religious themes. Her most faithful friend and admirer in all her long widowhood of twenty-two years was the great artist, sculptor, and painter, Michael Angelo, who never failed to treat her with the tenderest courtesy and respect. No other woman had ever touched his heart, and she gave him suggestion and inspiration for much of his work. After those first seven years of loneliness at Ischia, Vittoria spent much time in the convents of Orvieto and Viterbo, and later she lived in the greatest seclusion at Rome; there it was that death overtook her. Wherever she went, Michael Angelo's thoughtfulness followed her out, and in those last moments at Rome he was with her, faithful to the end. He was the kindly, rugged master-genius of his time, an intellectual giant, and she was a woman of rare devotion and purity of soul; and the real Platonic affection which seems to have possessed them, in that age of license and scepticism, is touching and impressive. What this friendship meant to him, the poet has expressed in the following sonnet addressed to Vittoria, which is here given in Wordsworth's matchless translation: