Authors:
  • There is no tongue to speak his eulogy;
    Too brightly burned his splendour for our eyes:
    Far easier to condemn his injurers,
    Than for the tongue to reach his smallest worth.
    He to the realms of sinfulness came down,
    To teach mankind; ascending then to God,
    Heaven unbarred to him her lofty gates,
    To whom his country hers refused to ope.
    Ungrateful land, to its own injury
    Nurse of his fate! Well too does this instruct,
    That greatest ills fall to the perfectest.
    And 'midst a thousand proofs, let this suffice,
    That, as his exile had no parallel,
    So never was there man more great than he.

    "Michael Angelo, considered as a philosophic poet".