the goldsmith; once or
twice the phoenix; ice melting at the fire; fire struck from the rock
which it afterwards consumes. Except one doubtful allusion to a journey,
there are almost no incidents. But there is much of the bright, sharp,
unerring skill, with which in boyhood he gave the look of age to the
head of a faun by chipping a tooth from its jaw with a single stroke of
the hammer. For Dante, the amiable and devout materialism of the middle
age sanctifies all that is presented by hand and eye. Michelangelo is
always pressing forward from the outward beauty--il bel del fuor che
agli occhi piace--to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma
universale--that abstract form of beauty, about which the Platonists
reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and
unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant
through the frail and yielding flesh. He accounts for love at first
sight by a previous state of existence--la dove io t'amai prima.

And yet there are many points in which he is really like Dante, and
comes very near to the original image, beyond those later and feebler
followers of Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from Plato, that
for lovers, the surfeiting of desire--ove gran desir gran copia affrena,
is a state less happy than misery full of hope--una miseria di speranza
piena. He recalls him in the repetition of the words gentile and
cortesia, in the personification of Amor, in the tendency to dwell
minutely on the physical effects of the presence of a beloved object on
the pulses and the heart. Above all, he resembles Dante in the warmth
and intensity of his political utterances, for the lady of one of his
noblest sonnets was from the first understood to be the city of
Florence; and he avers that all must be asleep in heaven, if she, who
was created "of angelic form," for a thousand lovers, is appropriated by
one alone, some Piero, or Alessandro de' Medici. Once and again he
introduces Love and Death, who dispute concerning him; for, like Dante
and all the nobler souls of Italy, he is much occupied with thoughts of
the grave, and his true mistress is death; death at first as the worst
of all sorrows and disgraces, with a clod of the field for its brain;
afterwards, death in its high distinction, its detachment from vulgar
needs, the angry stains of life and action escaping fast.

Some of those whom the gods love die young. This man, because the gods