Is parted never_."


"_Oh noble spirit, noble semblance taking,
We mirrored in Thy mortal beauty see
What Heaven and earth achieve in harmony_."

Thus wrote Michelangelo of Vittoria Colonna (Marchioness of Pescara),
"being enamoured of her divine spirit";[B] and though in the Sonnets of
the Nawab, who uses what is for him a foreign tongue, the ideal is
sometimes greater than the expression of it, yet the spirit shines out
with a light which none can mistake. And whether the average man accepts
or rejects the standards therein embodied, lovers of poetry will
recognise that the Nawab, in his championship of a high and noble ideal,
fights in the same army as Dante and Michelangelo,--neither of them
cloistered dreamers, neither of them arm-chair theorists, but men who
lived and loved and suffered amidst the turmoil of a world they viewed
with wide-open eyes and unflinching minds.

The chivalrous ideal of an exalted and inspiring love can be rejected if
we please;--but let none claim to be manly because this ideal seems too
ethereal. For it is by the most vigorous, most strenuous, and most
commanding souls and minds that this faith in the Eternal Beauty has
been cherished and upheld most ardently and resolutely.

_September 29, 1917_.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] See "Note on the History of the Sonnet in English Literature," below.