So dire to nature, armed with Faith alone,
The heart, from usage long, on him will call.”
—Sonnet 29.
She died towards the end of February, 1547—the exact date is not known—in the odor of sanctity, as one of her Italian biographers says. By her will she made Ascanio Colonna her heir, left one thousand scudi to each of the four convents in which she had so often lived, provided for all her servants, and disposed of a large sum in charity, besides making other pious bequests. Her signature to this instrument is in Latin, in these words: Ita testavi ego Vitoria Columna.
Strange it is, perhaps, but yet a worthy ending of a life of humility and mortification, even in the midst of the glories of the world, that no monument is raised over her remains. In fact, her body cannot be identified; for having requested to be buried in the religious habit of the nuns of Sant’Anna de’ Funari, and in their midst, it was committed to the common vault of the community, where it lies undistinguished from the others that repose there.
Her poetry may be classified into a series composed during her husband’s life and the first years of her widowhood, and another written when she had devoted herself to a stricter manner of living. The former is taken up with conjugal love, descriptions of nature, and miscellaneous subjects; the latter is exclusively given up to religious ideas: one is the profane, the other the sacred, series. As an example of the lofty energy with which her mind poured its whole current of feeling into the channel of Christian
devotion, we present her 28th sonnet in Harford’s translation:
“Deaf would I be to earthly sounds, to greet,
With thoughts intent and fixed on things above,
The high, angelic strains, the accents sweet,