was born his soul was
drunk with love. Leonora intoxicated it further. Of a type less
accentuated than Marguerite she was not more feminine but more gracious.
At Ferrara, in the wide leisures of her brother's court, Tasso,
Stundenlang, as Goethe wrote, sat with her.

"Vita della mia vita," he called her in the easy rime amorose with which
in saluting her he saluted the past, Dante and Petrarch, and saluted too
the future, preluding behind the centuries the arias wherewith Cimarosa,
Rossini and Bellini were to enchant the world. A true poet and a great
one, Byron said of him:

Victor unsurpassed in modern song
Each year brings forth its millions but how long
The tide of generations shall roll on
And not the whole combined and countless throng
Compose a mind like thine?

The treasures of that mind he poured at Leonora's feet. The cascade
enraptured her and Italy. Rome that for Petrarch had recovered the old
crown of pagan laurel saw there another brow on which it might be placed.
Before that supreme honor came Leonora died and Tasso, who for fifteen
years had served her, was insane.

Beauty may be degraded, it cannot be vulgarized. With the beauty of their
lives and love, time has tampered but without marring the perfection of
which both were made and to which at the time the love of Vittoria Colonna
and Michel Angelo alone is comparable.

Michel Angelo, named after the angel of justice, as Raphael was after the
angel of grace, separated himself from all that was not papal and
marmorean. Only Leonardo da Vinci who had gone and Ludwig of Bavaria who
had not come, the one a painter, the other a king, but both poets were as
isolating as he. He was disfigured. Because of that he made a solitude and
peopled it grandiosely with the grandeur of the genius that was his,
displaying in whatever he created that of which art had hitherto been
unconscious, the sovereignty not of beauty only but of right.

Balzac wrote abundantly to prove the influence that names have on their
possessors. In the curious prevision that gave Michel Angelo his name
there was an ideal. He followed it. It led him to another. There he knelt
before Vittoria Colonna who represented the soul of the Renaissance as he
did the conscience. The love that thereafter subsisted between them was,
if not perfect, then almost as perfect as human love can be; a love
neither sentimental nor sensual but gravely austere as true beauty ever
is.