The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with a note of the trovatore, as in the sestett of this sonnet:

Yet why, of one who loved thee not, command

Thy counterfeit, for other men to see,

When God himself did on my heart for me

Thy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand?

O how much subtler than a painter’s hand

Is love to render back the truth of thee!

My soul should be thy glass in time to be,

And in my thought thine effigy should stand.

Yet, lest the churlish critics of that age