used to instruct him in religion, and he seems to have felt for
her a love so deep, so reverent, so passionate, and so touching that the
words are alive in which he mentions her.

"I wished," he writes beneath a sonnet which he sent her, evidently in
return for some of her own religious poems, "I wished, before taking the
things that you had many times deigned to give me, in order that I might
receive them the less unworthily, to make something for you from my own
hand. But then, remembering and knowing that the grace of God may not be
bought, and that to accept it reluctantly is the greatest sin, I confess
my fault, and willingly receive the said things, and when they shall
arrive, not because they are in my house, but I myself as being in a
house of theirs, shall deem myself in Paradise."

We must not forget that at this time Michael Angelo was an old man,
that he carried about with him a freshness and vigor of feeling that
most people lose with their youth. A reservoir of emotion broke loose
within him at a time when it caused his hale old frame suffering to
undergo it, and reillumined his undimmed intellect to cope with it. A
mystery play was enacted in him,--each sonnet is a scene. There is the
whole of a man in each of many of these sonnets. They do not seem so
much like poems as like microcosms. They are elementally complete. The
soul of man could be evolved again from them if the formula were lost.

XL

I know not if it be the longed for light
Of its creator which the soul perceives,
Or if in people's memory there lives
A touch of early grace that keeps them bright
Or else ambition,--or some dream whose might
Brings to the eyes the hope the heart conceives
And leaves a burning feeling when it leaves--
That tears are welling in me as I write.

The things I feel, the things I follow and the things
I seek--are not in me,--I hardly know the place
To find them. It is others make them mine.
It happens when I see thee--and it brings
Sweet pain--a yes,--a no,--sorrow and grace
Surely it must have been those eyes of thine.

There are others which give a most touching picture of extreme piety in
extreme old age. And there are still others which are both love poems
and religious poems at the same time.

LV

Thou knowest that I know that thou dost know
How, to enjoy thee, I did come