Victor unsurpassed in modern song
Each year brings forth its millions but how long
The tide of generations shall roll on
And not the whole combined and countless throng
Compose a mind like thine?
The treasures of that mind he poured at Leonora’s feet. The cascade enraptured her and Italy. Rome that for Petrarch had recovered the old crown of pagan laurel saw there another brow on which it might be placed. Before that supreme honor came Leonora died and Tasso, who for fifteen years had served her, was insane.
Beauty may be degraded, it cannot be vulgarized. With the beauty of their lives and love, time has tampered but without marring the perfection of which both were made and to which at the time the love of Vittoria Colonna and Michel Angelo alone is comparable.
Michel Angelo, named after the angel of justice, as Raphael was after the angel of grace, separated himself from all that was not papal and marmorean. Only Leonardo da Vinci who had gone and Ludwig of Bavaria who had not come, the one a painter, the other a king, but both poets were as isolating as he. He was disfigured. Because of that he made a solitude and peopled it grandiosely with the grandeur of the genius that was his, displaying in whatever he created that of which art had hitherto been unconscious, the sovereignty not of beauty only but of right.
Balzac wrote abundantly to prove the influence that names have on their possessors. In the curious prevision that gave Michel Angelo his name there was an ideal. He followed it. It led him to another. There he knelt before Vittoria Colonna who represented the soul of the Renaissance as he did the conscience. The love that thereafter subsisted between them was, if not perfect, then almost as perfect as human love can be; a love neither sentimental nor sensual but gravely austere as true beauty ever is.
Since the days of Helen, love had been ascending. Sometimes it fell. Occasionally it lost its way. There were seasons when it passed from sight. But always the ascent was resumed. With Michel Angelo and Vittoria Colonna it reached a summit beyond which for centuries it could not go. In the interim there were other seasons in which it passed from sight. Meanwhile like Beauty in the mediæval night it waited. From Marguerite of France it had taken a device:—Non inferiora secutus.