A form divine, enamelled in the sky.”
He wrote in exactly the same tone of a verse in “Michael Angelo,” the four last lines of stanza three.
Should the reader trouble himself to run his mind over the early stanzas he will recall the writer’s visit to Spezia, among the marble hills: before then he had no conception of the mountains themselves being of that precious stone; he had only pictured to himself the quarries whence it was drawn.
Mr. William Rossetti, in a review in the Academy, of 1886, was so complimentary as to call “Michael Angelo” “a sculptured poem.” The introductory lines preceding stanza one greatly pleased Dante Rossetti.
I visited the monument of the Duke d’Urbino in the Capella dei Medici, until I had well mastered Angelo’s greatest work, and interpreted and translated it into metaphoric thought. I went to the opera to set my thoughts to music, the language of verse.
LXII.
We are all musicians, not that we all compose or play—except on each other’s feelings. The nervous system is the one marvellous harmonium. Its strings are more in number than those of a thousand harps, and all that is most exquisite, most exalted, and beautiful, can be performed upon it with a vehemence that incites to merriment or rends the heart. It can receive and realize the concert of a thousand voices!
All this we experience in our intercourse of every day; at the sight of a beloved one, we extemporize some pleasing harmony.
But this human harp has not all its rich notes attuned and struck by others; it is more often Eolian, and spontaneously pours out its emotions in the solitude of its sorrow and its joy; and it is not always music set in words or confined to our own sphere of being. This the poet feels when, resting in his chamber, his spirit passes into that of others, drawn by a divine sympathy. It becomes a concert then with many others’ trials. The sufferings are reverberated within him, like the sound of distant music.