The next is saddened by old age and death.  Love has yielded to piety, and is only remembered as what used to be.  Yet in form and feeling this is quite one of the most beautiful in the series supposed to refer to Vittoria Colonna:[425]—­

TORNAMI AL TEMPO

    Bring back the time when blind desire ran free,
      With bit and rein too loose to curb his flight;
      Give back the buried face, once angel-bright,
    That hides in earth all comely things from me;
    Bring back those journeys ta’en so toilsomely,
      So toilsome-slow to him whose hairs are white;
      Those tears and flames that in one breast unite;
    If thou wilt once more take thy fill of me!

    Yet Love!  Suppose it true that thou dost thrive
      Only on bitter honey-dews of tears,
      Small profit hast thou of a weak old man. 
    My soul that toward the other shore doth strive,
      Wards off thy darts with shafts of holier fears;
      And fire feeds ill on brands no breath can fan.

After this it only remains to quote the celebrated sonnet used by Varchi for his dissertation, the best known of all Michael Angelo’s poems.[426] The thought is this:  just as a sculptor hews from a block of marble the form that lies concealed within, so the lover has to extract from his lady’s heart the life or death of his soul,

NON HA L’OTTIMO ARTISTA

    The best of artists hath no thought to show
      Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
      Doth not include:  to break the marble spell
    Is all the hand that serves the brain can do. 
    The ill I shun, the good I seek, even so
      In thee, fair lady, proud, ineffable,
      Lies hidden:  but the art I wield so well
    Works adverse to my wish, and lays me low.

    Therefore not love, nor thy transcendent face,
      Nor cruelty, nor fortune, nor disdain,
      Cause my mischance, nor fate, nor destiny: 
    Since in thy heart thou carriest death and grace
      Enclosed together, and my worthless brain
      Can draw forth only death to feed on me.

The fire of youth was not extinct, we feel, after reading these last sonnets.  There is, indeed, an almost pathetic intensity of passion in the recurrence of Michael Angelo’s thoughts to a sublime love on the verge of the grave.  Not less important in their bearing on his state of feeling are the sonnets addressed to Cavalieri; and though his modern editor shrinks from putting a literal interpretation upon them, I am convinced that we must accept them simply as an expression of the artist’s homage for the worth and beauty of an excellent young man.  The two sonnets I intend to quote next[427] were written, according to Varchi’s direct testimony, for Tommaso Cavalieri, “in whom”—­the words are Varchi’s—­“I discovered,