ps even then composing those strangely passionate
spiritual sonnets which appeal to the soul through the heart, by the
womanly pride that strove to make the heart subject to the soul.

The commonplace romance which has represented Vittoria Colonna and
Michelangelo as in love with each other is as unworthy of both as it is
wholly without foundation. They first met nine years before her death,
when she was almost fifty and he was already sixty-four. She had then
been widowed twelve years, and it was long since she had refused in
Naples the princely suitors who made overtures for her hand. The true
romance of her life was simpler, nobler and more enduring, for it began
when she was a child, and it ended when she breathed her last in the
house of Giuliano Cesarini, the kinsman of her people, whose descendant
married her namesake in our own time.

At the age of four, Vittoria was formally betrothed to Francesco
d'Avalos, heir of Pescara, one of that fated race whose family history
has furnished matter for more than one stirring tale. Vittoria was born
in Marino, the Roman town and duchy which still gives its title to
Prince Colonna's eldest son, and she was brought up in Rome and Naples,
of which latter city her father was Grand Constable. Long before she was
married, she saw her future husband and loved him at first sight, as
she loved him to her dying day, so that although even greater offers
were made for her, she steadfastly refused to marry any other man. They
were united when she was seventeen years old, he loved her devotedly,
and they spent many months together almost without other society in the
island of Ischia. The Emperor Charles the Fifth was fighting his
lifelong fight with Francis the First of France. Colonna and Pescara
were for the Empire, and Francesco d'Avalos joined the imperial army; he
was taken prisoner at Ravenna and carried captive to France; released,
he again fought for Charles, who offered him the crown of the kingdom of
Naples; but he refused it, and still he fought on, to fall at last at
Pavia, in the strength of his mature manhood, and to die of his wounds
in Milan when Vittoria was barely five and thirty years of age, still
young, surpassingly beautiful, and gifted as few women have ever been.
What their love was, their long correspondence tells,--a love passionate
as youth and enduring as age, mutual, whole and faithful. For many years
the heartbroken woman lived in Naples, where she had been