in double force." The Florentines prepared to
fight for their liberty, and Michelangelo was found among the
patriots. No sense of personal gratitude to the Medici could shake his
love of liberty. He forsook the monuments and turned his skill to the
fortification of the city.

For eleven months Florence was besieged, and in the end the city was
captured. The Medici returned conquerors. Mercenaries now broke into
the houses, killing the best citizens. Had not Michelangelo been in
hiding, he too would have perished. But the Pope could not afford to
lose his best sculptor, and, calling him forth from his hiding-place,
again set him to work in the Medici chapel. It is not strange that the
sculptor's proud spirit rebelled at having to work on that which was
to honor the enemies of his beloved Florence.

Thus it was that his sculpture told the story of "the tragedy of
Florence: how hope had departed, how life had become a desert, and how
it was hard to struggle with waking consciousness, but good to sleep
and forget--nay, best of all, to be stone and feel no more."

The old writer Vasari, who was once a pupil of Michelangelo, and tells
us many anecdotes of the sculptor, relates that when the statue of
Night was first shown to the public, it called forth a verse from a
contemporary poet (Giovan Battista Strozzi). This is the verse:--

"Night in so sweet an attitude beheld
Asleep, was by an angel sculptured
In this stone; and sleeping, is alive;
Waken her, doubter; she will speak to thee."[32]

To this Michelangelo replied in the following lines:[33]--

"Welcome is sleep, more welcome sleep of stone
Whilst crime and shame continue in the land;
My happy fortune not to see or hear;
Waken me not;--in mercy whisper low."[32]

The artist's verse may be taken as a keynote to the solemn tragedy of
the work. In fact, the monuments are not really to Lorenzo and
Giuliano, but to Florence, to "the great city which had struggled and
erred so long, which had gone astray and repented, and suffered and
erred again, but always mightily, with full tide of life in her veins
and consciousness in her heart, until now the time had come when she
was dead and past, chained down by icy oppression in a living
grave."[34]

[Footnote 32: Both translations are from Horners' _Walks in Florence_.
Symonds has also translated the verses, but less literally.]

[Footnote 33: Swinburne in his lines, "In San Lorenzo," a