he letters, may be difficult to
comprehend. But until we have arrived at seizing them we shall fail to
understand the psychology of natures like Michelangelo. No language of
admiration is too strong, no self-humiliation too complete, for a soul
which has recognised deity made manifest in one of its main
attributes, beauty. In the sight of a philosopher, a poet, and an
artist, what are kings, popes, people of importance, compared with a
really perfect piece of God's handiwork?

_From thy fair face I learn, O my loved lord,
That which no mortal tongue can rightly say;
The soul imprisoned in her house of clay,
Holpen by thee, to God hath often soared.
And though the vulgar, vain, malignant horde
Attribute what their grosser wills obey,
Yet shall this fervent homage that I pay,
This love, this faith, pure joys for us afford.
Lo, all the lovely things we find on earth,
Resemble for the soul that rightly sees
That source of bliss divine which gave us birth:
Nor have we first-fruits or remembrances
Of heaven elsewhere. Thus, loving loyally,
I rise to God, and make death sweet by thee._

We know that, in some way or other, perhaps during those early years
at Florence among the members of the Platonic Academy, Michelangelo
absorbed the doctrines of the _Phoedrus_ and _Symposium_. His poems
abound in references to the contrast between Uranian and Pandemic,
celestial and vulgar, Eros. We have even one sonnet in which he
distinctly states the Greek opinion that the love of women is unworthy
of a soul bent upon high thoughts and virile actions. It reads like a
verse transcript from the main argument of the _Symposium_:--

_Love is not always harsh and deadly sin,
When love for boundless beauty makes us pine;
The heart, by love left soft and infantine,
Will let the shafts of God's grace enter in.
Love wings and wakes the soul, stirs her to win
Her flight aloft, nor e'er to earth decline;
'Tis the first step that leads her to the shrine
Of Him who slakes the thirst that burns within._

_The love of that whereof I speak ascends:
Woman is different far; the love of her
But ill befits a heart manly and wise.
The one love soars, the other earthward tends;
The soul lights this, while that the senses stir;
And still lust's arrow at base quarry flies._

The same exalted Platonism finds obscure but impassioned expression in
this fragm