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Updated: June 29, 2025
It is essential that, in the absence of that guarantee against the too rapid succession of pregnancies which suckling for a reasonable time presents, there should be self-restraint on both sides, lest the inscription on the young wife's grave should be, as I have too often known it, the same as, in despite of poetry and romance, her biographer assigns as the cause of the death of Petrarch's Laura, that she died worn out crebris partubus, by too many babies.
"Do me a favor when you are there; go to Avignon and Vaucluse; when you come to Petrarch's house, think of me, for there I passed the most hopeless hours of my life." "No, I will not go there to be sad. Sadness is made only for poetry or painting. It is your affair, not mine. I mean to be gay." "Try, then!" said Wharton. "See for yourself how far gayety will carry you. My turn will come!
Nevertheless, Petrarch's Latin poems bear witness to the natural genius for composition and expression to which we owe the Canzoniere. The editio princeps of the pastorals appeared in the form of a beautifully printed folio at Cologne in 1473, ninety-nine years after the poet's death.
Even in these poems the humanity of the writer's personality makes itself felt. While Laura tends to fade into a personification of poetry, and Petrarch's strongest convictions find expression through the mouth of St. Peter, we feel that behind Boccaccio's humanistic exercise lies his own amorous passion, his own religious enthusiasm, his own fatherly tenderness and love.
There is a long inscription on a slab of marble set in the front of the house, as is the fashion in Arezzo when a house has been the birthplace or residence of a distinguished man. Right opposite Petrarch's birth-house and it must have been the well whence the water was drawn that first bathed him is a well which Boccaccio has introduced into one of his stories.
Truth to tell, an element of vulgarity has found its way to this once ideal spot! But it requires no very vivid imagination to transport ourselves to the Eden described so musically in Petrarch's letters; and close at the doors of the hermitage he has rendered immortal lies scenery that might well recall his native Italy.
Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet had penetrated and he a lout in the village where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten. He did not know when Petrarch had lived there, a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries, but he knew that Petrarch was a poet. A weight of doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house. When, at last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch's door. A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall. The figs on it were green, though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqu
"There, there, just as I have seen it in my dreams!" she cried. "I never dreamed of Capello in my life that I did not dream of the lake and the Italian garden and I have not seen them since I was six years old! That statue is Petrarch's and on the base is an inscription from the sonnet, La vita fugge, e non s'aretta un ora, I forget the rest." "I remember," said Gaston, riding by her side.
Students of Petrarch's "Trionfi" will not fail to note what Shelley owes to that poet, and how he has transmuted the definite imagery of mediaeval symbolism into something metaphysical and mystic. And as I gazed, methought that in the way The throng grew wilder, as the woods of June When the south wind shakes the extinguished day;
At the very top was placed a statue of Petrarch, and on one side of it was a moss-grown marble bench, and on the other, an ancient sun-dial. The whole scene might have been transported from Petrarch's land. Below this garden lay a little lake, still and dark and cool.
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