his knee, waiting to rise and go forth, these weary Titans reclining at their feet, are immortal allegories of life and death, of thought and action. In this Dawn, wearily waking out of sleep, in this Night sunk in death-like slumber, Michelangelo gave utterance to the grief and shame of his own soul, and the burden of his eternal regrets. If anything were needed to tell us this, the lines which he wrote on the Notte, would be enough to show the thoughts that were working in his brain, when, at the bidding of a Medici Pope, he carved these marbles within the walls of captive Florence.
"Caro m'è il sonno, e più Pesser di sasso,
Mentre il danno e la vergogna dura:
Non veder, non sentir, m'è gran ventura
Però non mi destar. Deh! parla basso!"
"Good it is to slumber, and better still to be marble. Not to see, not to feel, is fortunate in these days of shame and misery. Therefore, do not wake me. Speak low, I pray you!"
In his early works, drawing his inspiration from antique marbles, Michelangelo had given expression to the radiant beauty and god-like strength of manhood; in the masterpieces of his middle period, the pride of life, the moral and physical sovereignty of man, had been the thought that was uppermost in his mind. In the creations of his latter days we read the sense of revolt and resistance, of scorn and suffering, which opposition and injustice had aroused in his breast, until last of all, every other feeling gives way to profound melancholy and unutterable weariness, and the wish to see and feel nothing, to sleep and wake no more.
In 1534, Michelangelo's father died at the age of
