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The other visitor was announced to Peter on the very day. "By the way, Peter, somebody's coming to tea this afternoon who's met you before met you at that odd boarding-house of yours a Miss Rossiter. Clare's an old friend of ours. I told you down at the sea about her and you said you remembered meeting her." "Remembered meeting her!" Did Dante remember meeting Beatrice did Petrarch remember Laura?
Early in life Lorenzo became imbued with the conviction that his native tongue was unsurpassed as a medium for "the expression of noble thoughts in noble numbers." Not only did he encourage others to study Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, but by following out his own precepts he became one of the great Italian poets.
Was it a Platonic sentiment, like the love of Petrarch for Laura, or something that we cannot explain, and yet real, a mystery of the soul in its deepest cravings and aspirations? And is love, among mortals generally, based on such a foundation?
Meanwhile, the sonnets of Petrarch had spread her fame throughout France and Italy, and attracted many to the court of Avignon, who were surprised and disappointed at the sight of her whom they had believed to be the loveliest of mortals. In 1347, during the absence of the poet from Avignon, Laura fell a victim to the plague, just twenty-one years from the day that Petrarch first met her.
No mind of the first order was ever a hermit. Modern literature enshrines the friendships of the great and makes them memorable. While letters last, society will never forget Charles Lamb and his companions; Dr. Johnson and his immortal group; Petrarch and his helpless dependence upon Laura; while the letters of Abélard and Héloise enshrine them in everlasting remembrance.
Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died, on his very hearthstone, as it were. So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one foot to the other, "When did Petrarch live here?" "Ah! I don't remember him." "Who was he?" "A poet, signor."
She was probably an Italian scholar, and could quote Petrarch and Tasso, and did quote them pretty often; she might even be a Della Cruscan by honorable election, with her own peculiar wreath of laurel and her own silver lyre; any way she was "a sister of the Muses," and had something to do with Apollo and Minerva, whom she was sure to call Pallas, as being more poetical.
It will be sufficient here to point out his beautiful early Noli me Tangere , The Portrait of his Wife , the Portrait of Himself , the Portrait of a Lady, with a Petrarch in her hands , and the Madonna dell' Arpie , that statuesque and too grandiose failure that is so near to success.
But the Scriptures, as Petrarch observes, rather suffer them than commend them; and St Jerom speaks against them with the utmost bitterness." And though second marriages were permitted among the Romans, yet they were at the same time discouraged, and those Roman widows who refused them were held in high esteem, and honoured with what Valerius Maximus calls the Corona Pudicitiae.
Indeed, as recently as 1500, the famous library collected by Petrarch, and presented by Gian Galeazzo Visconti to the University, was carried off by the French. To judge from the pictures which the Pavian student, writing in after years, gives of his physical self, it may be inferred that he was ill-endowed by the Graces. "I am of middle height.
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