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Updated: May 29, 2025
The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with a full stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square before the church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time open to the skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within hearing of the vocal stream is Petrarch's sepulchre.
At the moment when the first shot was fired on Menotti's house she had been reading Petrarch's Ode to the Lords of Italy, and the lines l'antico valor Ne Vitalici cor non e ancor morto had lodged like a bullet in her brain. From the day of her marriage she began to take a share in the silent work which was going on throughout Italy.
Here, too, the way had been prepared by antiquity, but it was their own common sense and observation which taught them what to say. Petrarch's attitude towards the astrologers, whom he knew by personal intercourse, is one of bitter contempt; and no one saw through their system of lies more clearly than he.
So far does love of gain stimulate the human mind. Quoted from Petrarch's Lettere Senili in Oliphant, Makers of Venice , p. 349; the whole of this charming chapter, 'The Guest of Venice', should be read.
Far away, over against the city towers, the stately snow-crowned Mont Ventoux and the violet hills shutting in Petrarch's Vaucluse. How warm and southern nay, Oriental is the scene before us, although painted in delicatest pearly tints! It is difficult to believe that we are still in France; we seem suddenly to have waked up in Jerusalem!
Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues of no great value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of which anticipated the loveliest of Petrarch's; and he was the author of various prose works, political and philosophical, all more or less masterly for the time in which he lived, and all coadjutors of his poetry in fixing his native tongue.
There is no stronger proof of the transcending power of the genius of Burns than is found in the fact that, by a bare half-dozen of his stanzas, an humble dairy servant else unheard of outside her parish and forgotten at her death is immortalized as a peeress of Petrarch's Laura and Dante's Beatrice, and has been for a century loved and mourned of all the world.
This was a revival of the old Greek method of honoring poets, and as such it was felt by the Italians a specially fitting way to proclaim their reviving interest in art. So a great public gathering was arranged at Rome, and the laurel was with elaborate ceremonies placed on Petrarch's brow.
Now for the first time there appeared a kind of literary republic in Europe united by the magic bond of Petrarch's influence, and he was better known and exercised a more extensive and powerful influence than many of the sovereigns of the day.
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