What delicate appreciation of the genius of the man she loved! How it must have stimulated and blessed him! But more than all else she loved Michael Angelo for the one thing women value most in men, the strength and constancy of a nature that gives a single and lasting devotion.
She gave to Michael Angelo a vellum book, containing one hundred and three of her sonnets, and sent him forty new ones which she composed at the convent of Viterbo. These he had bound up in the same book which he received from her; her for whom, he said, "I would have done more than for any one else whom I could name in the world." He wrote back his thanks with the sweet self-abnegation of love.
"And well I see how false it were to think
That any work, faded and frail, of mine,
Could emulate the perfect grace of thine.
Genius, and art, and daring, backward shrink.
A thousand works from mortals like to me
Can ne'er repay what Heaven has given thee."
She inspired him to write poetry. "The productions of our great artist's pen," says John Edward Taylor, "rank unquestionably in the number of the most perfect of his own or any subsequent age. Stamped by a flow of eloquence, a purity of style, an habitual nobleness of sentiment, they discover a depth of thought rarely equalled, and frequently approaching to the sublimity of Dante."