difficulty in mastering his thoughts and images.  This we discover from the innumerable variants of the same madrigal or sonnet which he made, and his habit of returning to them at intervals long after their composition.  A good fourth of the Codex Vaticanus consists of repetitions and rifacimenti.  He was also wont to submit what he wrote to the judgment of his friends, requesting them to alter and improve.  He often had recourse to Luigi del Riccio’s assistance in such matters.  I may here adduce an inedited letter from two friends in Rome, Giovanni Francesco Bini and Giovanni Francesco Stella, who returned a poem they had handled in this manner:  “We have done our best to alter some things in your sonnet, but not to set it all to rights, since there was not much wanting.  Now that it is changed or put in order, according as the kindness of your nature wished, the result will be more due to your own judgment than to ours, since you have the true conception of the subject in your mind.  We shall be greatly pleased if you find yourself as well served as we earnestly desire that you should command us.”  It was the custom of amateur poets to have recourse to literary craftsmen before they ventured to circulate their compositions.  An amusing instance of this will be found in Professor Biagi’s monograph upon Tullia d’Aragona, all of whose verses passed through the crucible of Benedetto Varchi’s revision.

The thoughts and images out of which Michelangelo’s poetry is woven are characteristically abstract and arid.  He borrows no illustrations from external nature.  The beauty of the world and all that lives in it might have been non-existent so far as he was concerned.  Nor do his octave stanzas in praise of rural life form an exception to this statement; for these are imitated from Poliziano, so far as they attempt pictures of the country, and their chief poetical feature is the masque of vices belonging to human nature in the city.  His stock-in-trade consists of a few Platonic notions and a few Petrarchan antitheses.  In the very large number of compositions which are devoted to love, this one idea predominates:  that physical beauty is a direct beam sent from the eternal source of all reality, in order to elevate the lover’s soul and lead him on the upward path toward heaven.  Carnal passion he regards with the aversion of an ascetic.  It is impossible to say for certain to whom these mystical love-poems were addressed.  Whether a man or a woman is in the case (for both were probably the objects of his aesthetical admiration), the tone of feeling, the language, and the philosophy do not vary.  He uses the same imagery, the same conceits, the same abstract ideas for both sexes, and adapts the leading motive which he had invented for a person of one sex to a person of the other when it suits his purpose.  In our absolute incapacity to fix any amative connection upon Michelangelo, or to link his name with that of any contemporary beauty, we arrive at the conclusion, strange as this may be, that the greater part of his love-poetry is a scholastic exercise upon emotions transmuted into metaphysical and mystical conceptions.  Only two pieces in the long series break this monotony by a touch of realism.  They are divided by a period of more than thirty years.  The first seems to date from an early epoch of his life:—­