of those sunbright eyes,
    Nor passing smile, nor melancholy grace,
    Nor thought half utter’d, feeling half betray’d
    Nor glance of kindness,—­no, nor gentlest touch
    Of that dear hand, in amity extended,
    That e’er was lost to me;—­that treasur’d well,
    And oft recall’d, dwells not upon my soul
    Like sweetest music heard at summer’s eve!

Yesterday we visited the church of San Lorenzo, the Laurentian library, and the Pietra Dura manufactory, and afterwards spent an hour in the Tribune.

In a little chapel in the San Lorenzo are Michel Angelo’s famous statues, the Morning, the Noon, the Evening, and the Night.  I looked at them with admiration rather than with pleasure; for there is something in the severe and overpowering style of this master, which affects me disagreeably, as beyond my feeling, and above my comprehension.  These statues are very ill disposed for effect:  the confined cell (such it seemed) in which they are placed is so strangely disproportioned to the awful and massive grandeur of their forms.

There is a picture by Michel Angelo, considered a chef-d’oeuvre, which hangs in the Tribune, to the right of the Venus:  now if all the connaisseurs in the world, with Vasari at their head, were to harangue for an hour together on the merits of this picture, I might submit in silence, for I am no connoisseur; but that it is a disagreeable, a hateful picture, is an opinion which fire could not melt out of me.  In spite of Messieurs les Connaisseurs, and Michel Angelo’s fame, I would die in it at the stake:  for instance, here is the Blessed Virgin, not the “Vergine Santa, d’ogni grazia piena,” but a Virgin, whose brick-dust coloured face, harsh unfeminine features, and muscular, masculine arms, give me the idea of a washerwoman, (con rispetto parlando!) an infant Saviour with the proportions of a giant:  and what shall we say of the nudity of the figures in the back-ground; profaning the subject and shocking at once good taste and good sense?  A little farther on, the eye rests on the divine Madre di Dio of Correggio:  what beauty, what sweetness, what maternal love, and humble adoration are blended in the look and attitude with which she bends over her infant!  Beyond it hangs the Madonna del Cardellino of Raffaelle:  what heavenly grace, what simplicity, what saint-like purity, in the expression of that face, and that exquisite mouth!  And from these must I turn back, on pain of being thought an ignoramus, to admire the coarse perpetration of Michel Angelo—­because it is Michel Angelo’s?  But I speak in ignorance.[F]

To return to San Lorenzo.  The chapel of the Medici, begun by Ferdinand the First, where coarse brickwork and plaster mingle with marble and gems, is still unfinished and likely to remain so:  it did not interest me.  The fine bronze sarcophagus, which encloses the ashes of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and of his brother Giuliano, assassinated by the Pazzi, interested me far more.  While I was standing carelessly in front of the high altar, I happened to look down, and under my feet were these words, “TO COSMO THE VENERABLE, THE FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY.”  I moved away in haste, and before I had decided to my own satisfaction upon Cosmo’s claims to the gratitude and veneration of posterity, we left the church.