Would any one feel the difference between his faint abstractions and the
Platonism of a powerful nature fitted alike for the withdrawal of ideal
contemplation and for breasting the storms of life,--would any one know
how wide a depth divides a noble friendship based on sympathy of pursuit
and aspiration, on that mutual help which souls capable of
self-sustainment are the readiest to give or to take, and a simulated
passion, true neither to the spiritual nor the sensual part of man,--let
him compare the sonnets of Petrarch with those which Michel Angelo
addressed to Vittoria Colonna. In them the airiest pinnacles of sentiment
and speculation are buttressed with solid mason-work of thought, and of
an actual, not fancied experience, and the depth of feeling is measured
by the sobriety and reserve of expression, while in Petrarch's all
ingenuousness is frittered away into ingenuity. Both are cold, but the
coldness of the one is self-restraint, while the other chills with
pretence of warmth. In Michel Angelo's, you feel the great architect; in
Petrarch's the artist who can best realize his conception in the limits
of a cherry-stone. And yet this man influenced literature longer and more
widely than almost any other in modern times.
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