earth! 
    Dear Lord, I cannot even half-way rise
    Unless Thou help me on this pilgrimage. 
  Teach me to hate the world so little worth,
    And, all the lovely things I clasp and prize,
    That endless life, ere death, may be my wage.

While still in his seventieth year, Michelangelo had educated himself to meditate upon the thought of death as a prophylactic against vain distractions and the passion of love.  “I may remind you that a man who would fain return unto and enjoy his own self ought not to indulge so much in merrymakings and festivities, but to think on death.  This thought is the only one which makes us know our proper selves, which holds us together in the bond of our own nature, which prevents us from being stolen away by kinsmen, friends, great men of genius, ambition, avarice, and those other sins and vices which filch the man from himself, keep him distraught and dispersed, without ever permitting him to return unto himself and reunite his scattered parts.  Marvellous is the operation of this thought of death, which, albeit death, by his nature, destroys all things, preserves and supports those who think on death, and defends them from all human passions.”  He supports this position by reciting a madrigal he had composed, to show how the thought of death is the greatest foe to love:—­

  Not death indeed, but the dread thought of death
    Saveth and severeth
    Me from the heartless fair who doth me slay: 
    And should, perchance, some day
  The fire consuming blaze o’er measure bright,
  I find for my sad plight
  No help but from death’s form fixed in my heart;
  Since, where death reigneth, love must dwell apart.

In some way or another, then, Michelangelo used the thought of death as the mystagogue of his spirit into the temple of eternal things—­[Greek:  ta aidia], die bleibenden Verhaeltnisse—­and as the means of maintaining self-control and self-coherence amid the ever-shifting illusions of human life.  This explains why in his love-sonnets he rarely speaks of carnal beauty except as the manifestation of the divine idea, which will be clearer to the soul after death than in the body.

When his life was drawing toward its close, Michelangelo’s friends were not unnaturally anxious about his condition.  Though he had a fairly good servant in Antonio del Franzese, and was surrounded by well-wishers like Tommaso Cavalieri, Daniele da Volterra, and Tiberio Calcagni, yet he led a very solitary life, and they felt he ought to be protected.  Vasari tells us that he communicated privately with Averardo Serristori, the Duke’s ambassador in Rome, recommending that some proper housekeeper should be appointed, and that due control should be instituted over the persons who frequented his house.  It was very desirable, in case of a sudden accident, that his drawings and works of art should not be dispersed, but that what belonged to S. Peter’s, to the Laurentian Library, and to the Sacristy should be duly assigned.  Lionardo Buonarroti must have received similar advice from Rome, for a furious letter is extant, in which Michelangelo, impatient to the last of interference, literally rages at him:—­