Symonds' article consists in translations of Michelangelo's poetry, from Guasti's edition.

'The idealist who became a reformer with Savonarola, and a republican superintending the fortification of Florence--the nest where he was born, il nido ove naqqu'io, as he calls it once, in a sudden throb of affection.' (45)

'Beneath the Platonic calm of the sonnets there is latent a deep delight in carnal form and colour. There, and still more in the madrigals, he often falls into the language of less tranquil affections; while some of them have the colour of penitence, as from a wanderer
returning home. He who spoke so decisively of the supremacy in the imaginative world of the unveiled human form had not been always, we may think, a mere Platonic lover. Vague and wayward his loves may have been; but they partook of the strength of his nature, and sometimes, it may be, would by no means become music, so that the comely order of his days was quite put out: par che amaro ogni mio dolce io senta.' (45)

'The interest of Michelangelo's poems is that they make us spectators of this struggle; the struggle of a strong nature to adorn and attune itself; the struggle of a desolating passion, which yearns to be resigned and sweet and pensive, as Dante's was. It is a consequence of the occasional and informal character of his poetry, that it brings us nearer to himself, his own mind and temper, than any work done only to support a literary reputation could possibly do. His letters tell us little that is worth knowing about him--a few poor quarrels about money and commissions. But it is quite otherwise with these songs and sonnets, written down at odd moments, sometimes on the margins of his sketches, themselves often unfinished sketches, arresting some salient feeling or unpremeditated idea as it passed.' (46)

'in 1858 the last of the Buonarroti bequeathed to the municipality of Florence the curiosities of his family. Among them was a precious volume containing the autograph of the sonnets. A learned Italian, Signor Cesare Guasti, undertook to collate this autograph with other manuscripts at the Vatican and elsewhere, and in 1863 published a true version of Michelangelo's poems, with dissertations and a paraphrase.' (46)

'From allusions in the sonnets, we may divine that when they [Michelangelo and Vittoria Colonnia] first approached each other he had debated much with himself whether this last passion would be the most unsoftening, the most desolating of all--un dolce amaro, un si e no mi muovi; is it carnal affection, or, del suo prestino stato (Plato's ante-natal state) il raggio ardente?' (47)

'The older, conventional criticism, dealing with the text of 1623, had lightly assumed that all or nearly all the sonnets were actually addressed to Vittoria herself; but Signor Guasti finds only four, or at most five, which can be so attributed on genuine authority.' (47)

'for Michelangelo, to write down his passionate thoughts at all, to make sonnets about them, was already in some measure to command, and have his way with them--

La vita del mia amor non e il cor mio,

Ch'amor, di quel ch'io t'amo, e senza core.' (47)

'Michelangelo is always pressing forward from the outward beauty--il bel del fuor che agli occhi piace--to apprehend the unseen beauty; trascenda nella forma universale--that abstract form of beauty, about which the Platonists reason. And this gives the impression in him of something flitting and unfixed, of the houseless and complaining spirit, almost clairvoyant through the frail and yielding flesh. He accounts for love at first sight by a previous state of existence--la dove io t'amai prima.

And yet there are many points in which he is really like Dante, and comes very near to the original image, beyond those later and feebler followers of Petrarch. He learns from Dante rather than from Plato, that for lovers, the surfeiting of desire--ove gran desir gran copia affrena, is a state less happy than misery full of hope--una miseria di speranza piena. He recalls him in the repetition of the words gentile and cortesia, in the personification of Amor, in the tendency to dwell minutely on the physical effects of the presence of a beloved object on the pulses and the heart. (49-50)