Explore "Vittoria" by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Wise was the word the wise man spake, who said, / "Angelo was the only man to whom God gave / Four souls," -- the soul of sculpture and of song, / Of architecture and of art; these all. / For so God loved him, as if he were / His only child, and grouped about those brows / Ideals of Himself -- not angels mild / As those that flit and beckon other lives, / But cherubim and seraphim; tall, strong, / Unsleeping, terrible; with wings across / Their mighty feet; and eyes -- if we would look / Upon their blazing eyes, these too are hid -- / Some angels are all wings! Oh, shine and fly! / Were ye not angels, ye would strike us blind.
And yet they did not, could not dazzle her -- / That one sweet woman unto whom he bent / As pliant as the quarried marble turned / To life immortal in his own great hand. / Steadfast, Vittoria looked on Angelo. / She lifted lonely eyes. The years trod slow. / Fourfold the reverence which he gave to her, / Fourfold the awful tenderness, fourfold / The loyalty, the trust. And oh, fourfold / The comfort, beyond all power of comforting, / Whereby a lesser man may heal the hurt / Of widowhood!