itten with wild woe
To see not them but Thee by death undone,
Were those blest souls, when Thou above the sun
Didst raise, by dying, men that lay so low:
Elate, since freedom from all ills that flow
From their first fault for Adam's race was won;
Sore smitten, since in torment fierce God's son
Served servants on the cruel cross below.

Heaven showed she knew Thee, who Thou wert and whence,
Veiling her eyes above the riven earth;
The mountains trembled and the seas were troubled:
He took the Fathers from hell's darkness dense:
The torments of the damned fiends redoubled:
Man only joyed, who gained baptismal birth.

The collection of his poems is closed with yet another sonnet in the same
lofty strain of prayer, and faith, and hope in God.[437]

MENTRE M' ATTRISTA

Mid weariness and woe I find some cheer
In thinking of the past, when I recall
My weakness and my sins and reckon all
The vain expense of days that disappear:
This cheers by making, ere I die, more clear
The frailty of what men delight miscall;
But saddens me to think how rarely fall
God's grace and mercies in life's latest year.

For though Thy promises our faith compel,
Yet, Lord, what man shall venture to maintain
That pity will condone our long neglect?
Still, from Thy blood poured forth we know full well
How without measure was Thy martyr's pain,
How measureless the gifts we dare expect.

From the thought of Dante, through Plato, to the thought of Christ: so our
study of Michael Angelo's sonnets has carried us. In communion with these
highest souls Michael Angelo habitually lived; for he was born of their
lineage, and was like them a lifelong alien on the earth.

FOOTNOTES:

[412] See Guasti's _Rime di Michel Agnolo Buonarrote_, Firenzi, 1863, p.
189. The future references will be made to that edition.

[413] "I can translate, and have translated, two books of Ariosto at the
rate nearly of one hundred lines a day; but so much meaning has been put
by Michael Angelo into so little room, and that meaning sometimes so
excellent in itself, that I found the difficulty of translating him
insurmountable."--Note to Wordsworth's English version of some sonnets of
Michael Angelo.

[414] See above, Chapter VIII, The Pieta.

[415] See Gotti's Life, p. 48, and Giannotti's works (Firenze, Le
Monnier, 1850), quoted