some religious. Yet they
have this in common, that each seems to be the bearer of some deep
harmony, whose vibrations we feel and whose truth we recognize. From the
very beginning they seem to have had a provocative and stimulating
effect upon others; ever since they were written, cultivated people have
been writing essays about them. One of them has been the subject of
repeated academical disquisition. They absorb and reflect the spirit of
the times; they appeal to and express the individual; they have done
this through three centuries and throughout who shall say how many
different educational conditions. Place them in what light you will,
they gleam with new meanings. This is their quality. It is hard to say
whence the vitality comes. They have often a brilliancy that springs
from the juxtaposition of two thoughts,--a brilliancy like that
produced by unblended colors roughly but well laid on. They have, as it
were, an organic force which nothing can render. The best of them have
the reflective power which gives back light from the mind of the reader.
The profounder ones appear to change and glow under contemplation; they
re-echo syllables from forgotten voices; they suggest unfathomable
depths of meaning. These sonnets are protean in character; they
represent different things to different people,--religion to one, love
to another, philosophy to a third.

It is easy to guess what must be the fate of such poems in translation.
The translator inevitably puts more of himself than of Michael Angelo
into his version. Even the first Italian editor could not let them
alone. He felt he must dose them with elegance. This itching to amend
the sonnets results largely from the obscurity of the text. A translator
is required to be, above all things, comprehensible, and, therefore, he
must interpret, he must paraphrase. He is not at liberty to retain the
equivocal suggestiveness of the original. The language of a translation
must be chastened, or, at least, grammatical, and Michael Angelo's verse
is very often neither the one nor the other.

The selections which follow are not given as representative of the
different styles in the original. They have been chosen from among those
sonnets which seemed most capable of being rendered into English.

The essential nature of the sonnet is replete with difficulty, and
special embarrassments are encountered in the Italian sonnet. The
Italian sonnet is, both in its form and spirit, a thin