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She was never to carry out this design. She dictated Thoughts during Sickness in the intervals of sickness, when concentrated thought was possible. Their shortness tells of the shortness of those intervals. Who is not better for thinking over these sonnets, recalling as they do a peaceful spirit of resignation and calmness at the approach of the last hour?
Her sentiments were always just and striking and have furnished me material for some of my sonnets; she always spoke at the proper time, and always to the purpose, so that nothing could be added, nothing taken away.... To recount all her excellencies would far exceed my present limits, and I shall therefore conclude with affirming that there was nothing which could be desired in a beautiful and accomplished woman which was not in her most abundantly found.
My wish would be simply to present it to thee plain and unadorned, without any embellishment of preface or uncountable muster of customary sonnets, epigrams, and eulogies, such as are commonly put at the beginning of books. For I can tell thee, though composing it cost me some labour, I found none greater than the making of this Preface thou art now reading.
Child of the pavement, of strange sonnets and stranger music, I remember thee; I remember the silk shirts, the four sous of Italian cheese, the roll of bread, and the glass of milk, the streets were thy dining-room. And the five-mile walk daily to the suburban music hall where five francs were earned by playing the accompaniments of comic songs.
At the very time when we have historical record of a Pope's presence as an amused spectator of the proceedings, Michelangelo had lately painted the ceiling of the Sixtine chapel, and had not yet begun his Last Judgment; and 'Diva' Vittoria Colonna, not yet the friend of his later years, was perhaps even then composing those strangely passionate spiritual sonnets which appeal to the soul through the heart, by the womanly pride that strove to make the heart subject to the soul.
Amedee composed his first sonnets in her honor, and he adored her, of course, but he was also in love with the Lantz young ladies, whom he saw sometimes at Madame Roger's, and who each wore Sunday evenings roses in her hair, which made them resemble those pantheons in sponge-cake that pastry-cooks put in their windows on fete days.
By dint of silent contemplation of your pictured face, I have succeeded in deciphering the expression of every feature and tracing its connection with some grace of the spirit, and then I pen a sonnet to you in Spanish on the harmony of the twofold beauty in which nature has clothed you. These sonnets you will never see, for my poetry is too unworthy of its theme, I dare not send it to you.
But it is not permitted that any loyal gentleman devote every hour of his life to sighing and making sonnets, and to the general solacing of a maid's loneliness in this dull little Deptford. Nor would you, I am sure, desire me to do so." "I hardly know what I desire," she told him ruefully. "But I know that when you talk of your man's business I am lonely and chilled and far away from you.
It is in Du Bellay's Olive, a collection of sonnets in praise of a half-imaginary lady, Sonnetz a la louange d'Olive, that these characteristics are most abundant. Here is a perfectly crystallised specimen:
'Did you buy that sugar at the Sault? said the old man, eagerly. 'O no; I brought it up from below. For literature I have this small edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, the cream of the whole world's poetry; and when I am tired of looking at the trees and the sky, I look at this, Titian's lovely daughter with her upheld salver of fruit. Is she not beautiful as a dream?
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