If each the other love, himself foregoing,
      With such delight, such savour, and so well,
      That both to one sole end their wills combine;
    If thousands of these thoughts all thought outgoing
      Fail the least part of their firm love to tell;
      Say, can mere angry spite this knot untwine?

COLUI CHE FECE

    He who ordained, when first the world began,
      Time that was not before creation’s hour,
      Divided it, and gave the sun’s high power
    To rule the one, the moon the other span: 
    Thence fate and changeful chance and fortune’s ban
      Did in one moment down on mortals shower: 
      To me they portioned darkness for a dower;
    Dark hath my lot been since I was a man.

    Myself am ever mine own counterfeit;
      And as deep night grows still more dim and dun,
      So still of more mis-doing must I rue: 
    Meanwhile this solace to my soul is sweet,
      That my black night doth make more clear the sun
      Which at your birth was given to wait on you.

A sonnet written for Luigi del Riccio, on the death of his friend Cecchino Bracci, is curious on account of its conceit.[432] Michael Angelo says:  “Cecchino, whom you loved, is dead; and if I am to make his portrait, I can only do so by drawing you, in whom he still lives.”  Here, again, we trace the Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual, and of beauty as a form that finds its immortality within the lover’s soul.  This Cecchino was a boy who died at the age of seventeen.  Michael Angelo wrote his epicedion in several centuries of verses, distributed among his friends in the form of what he terms polizzini, as though they were trifles.

A PENA PRIMA

    Scarce had I seen for the first time his eyes
      Which to thy living eyes are life and light,
      When closed at last in death’s injurious night
    He opened them on God in Paradise. 
    I know it and I weep, too late made wise: 
      Yet was the fault not mine; for death’s fell spite
      Robbed my desire of that supreme delight,
    Which in thy better memory never dies.

    Therefore, Luigi, if the task be mine
      To make unique Cecchino smile in stone
      For ever, now that earth hath made him dim,
    If the beloved within the lover shine,
      Since art without him cannot work alone,
      Thee must I carve to tell the world of him.

In contrast with the philosophical obscurity of many of the sonnets hitherto quoted, I place the following address to Night—­one, certainly, of Michael Angelo’s most beautiful and characteristic compositions, as it is also the most transparent in style[433]:—­

O NOTT’, O DOLCE TEMPO