gar; the end is the least popular, because it is the most original and marvellous. The "Inferno" is sculpture; the "Purgatorio," painting; the "Paradiso," music. The scene rises from contending passions, through purifying penance, to perfected love. An excited multitude, gazing, wander with him through the first; a smaller and quieter throng accompany him over the second; a select, ever-lessening number follow him up the third; and at last he is left on the summit, alone, rapt in the beatific vision.

PETRARCH.

SOME peculiarities, generally in literary history traced to Petrarch, have given him the reputation of more originality as a man and as an author, more novelty and power of character, than he really possessed. Still his influence, both personal and literary, has been remarkable. And his tender philanthropy, ardent patriotism, romantic melancholy, the music of his plaintive though monotonous lyre, combine to lend a deep interest alike to his person and his story.

The love of friends, the chivalric love of woman, the love of fame, the love of books, the love of the great men of the past, the love of nature, the love of solitude, these were the dominant sentiments in the soul of Petrarch. Of course all these sentiments had been felt and expressed many times before. Chivalry, which in its essence is an imaginative heightening of sympathy, gave them an especial enrichment and refinement, a vividness and an exaltation not known in previous ages. The Troubadours, the immediate predecessors of Petrarch, had sung the chief of them with variety and emphasis, borrowing something from the classic traditions, but adding more through that union of ecclesiastical Christianity and Germanic feeling which formed the peculiar genius of knighthood. In the works of Petrarch the sentiments of classic philosophy and poesy blend with the sentiments of the best Christian Fathers who had written on the monastic life, and with the sentiments of the Provençal

bards. His originality and importance consist, first, in the peculiar combination he gave to these pre-existing ideas and feelings; secondly, in the new tone and accent lent to them by his personal character and experience; and thirdly, in the fresh impetus imparted for their reproduction and circulation in subsequent authors by the popularity of his writings and by the conspicuousness of his position as the reviver of letters at the close of the Dark Age.

The strength of Petrarch is his sympathetic wealth of consciousness. His learning, eloquence, and love of liberty, his gentleness and magnanimity, his purity, height, and constancy of feeling are admirable. He says:

And new tears born of old desires declare
That still I am as I was wont to be,

And that a thousand changes change not me.

His weaknesses are an exorbitant, all-too-susceptible vanity, the prominence of a complacency forever alternating between fruition and mortification, the painful mingling of an effeminate self-fondling with a querulous selfdissatisfaction. The Petrarchan strain has been caught and echoed interminably since his day. The morbid subjective school, in some sense founded by him, has been continued by Rousseau, St. Pierre, Chateaubriand, the young Goethe, Byron, Lenau, and scores of other powerful authors, who have carried it much further than he, and made it more and more complicated by additionally interweaving their own idiosyncrasies. Still above the jar of tones the fundamental chords he sounded are clearly distinguishable; a troubled excess of sensibility, exaggerated aspirations, separation from the crowd, a high-strung love of nature and seclusion, all grouped around an unhappy and importunate sense of self.

Petrarch was fitted by his poetic temperament to enter into the charms of the withdrawn scenes of nature, beautiful and wild landscapes, with an intensity uncommon in his day; in ours, partly through his influence, more frequent. The unaffectedness of his taste for nature is shown by the exquisite loveliness of the sites he chose for

his residences at Vaucluse, Parma, Garignano and Arqua. For sixteen years he spent much of his time in the picturesque seclusion of Vaucluse. This romantic valley, with its celebrated fountain, sixteen miles from Avignon, will forever be associated with his tender passion and his charming fame. In this profound retreat, amid this rugged scenery, "in a shady garden formed for contemplation and sacred to Apollo," or in a deeper grotto at the source of the swift Sorga, which he was "confident resembled the place where Cicero went to declaim,” he roamed and mused, he nursed and sang his love for Laura. He said his disgust of the frivolousness and heartlessness, plottings and vices of the city drove him for the soothing delights of the country to this retired haunt, which had the virtue of giving freedom to his heart and wings to his imagination. After his frequent journeys on literary and state commissions to the courts of princes in famous cities, he always hurried back to his beloved Vaucluse, comparing his condition to "that of a thirsty stag, who, stunned with the noise of the dogs, seeks the cool stream and the silent shade." Here he passed much time alone, among the rocks and defiles, and by the brink of the fountain; also much time with his friend Philip de Cabassole. These two friends often strolled through the valley and over the cliffs, discussing literary and philosophical questions, until their servants, alarmed at their long absence, went forth with torches to seek them.

Petrarch always had a sincere fondness for solitude, a deep familiarity with its true genius. Few have written on the subject so well as he in his treatise on the "Leisure of the Religious," in which with such glow and sweetness he depicts the advantages of the monastic life; and in his elaborate dissertation "Concerning the Solitary Life." The latter work was sketched in his early manhood, but not completed till twenty years afterward. The argument of it is that the true end of life for every man is perfection; and that the distractions, insincerities, corruptions of crowded society are fatal to progress in this; while the calmness, freedom, and devout meditation of solitude are highly favorable to it. Whenever he touches

on this theme the pen of Petrarch seems impregnated with the softest fire. Born for solitude, enamored of leisure, liberty, reverie, and ideal virtue, he fled the noise and pestilential vice of cities with horror, and sought the silence and purity of the fields and the woods with a depth of pleasure which his pages clearly reflect.

Still have I sought a life of solitude

This know the rivers, and each wood, and plain
That I might 'scape the blind and sordid train
Who from the path have flown of peace and good.

After secretly fleeing back to Vaucluse, he writes to a friend: "I had resolved to return here no more: in justification of my inconstancy I have nothing to allege but the necessity I feel for solitude." At another time he

writes: "The love of solitude and repose is natural to me. Too much known, too much sought in my own country, praised and flattered even to nausea, I seek a corner where I may live unknown and without glory. My desert of Vaucluse presents itself with all its charm. Its hills, its fountains, and its woods, so favorable to my studies, possess my soul with a sweet emotion I cannot describe. I am no longer astonished that Camillus, that great man whom Rome exiled, sighed after his country. Solitude is my country."

The pictures in the imagination of Petrarch-as afterward was the case with Rousseau- -were so vivid and so delightful that his own undisturbed reveries gave him the most satisfactory employment. His ideal enjoyments by himself, with none to contradict, nothing to jar or vex, were a more than sufficient substitute for the usual intercourse of men. It was a necessity with him to express what he thought and felt, to mirror himself in sympathy either actual or imaginary. To restrain his emotions in disguises or in bonds, to accept commands from others, was ever intolerably irksome to him. These are the very qualities to make vulgar society distasteful, solitude delicious. "Nothing is so fatiguing," he says, “as to converse with many, or with one whom we do not love and who is not familiar with the same subjects as ourselves." "On

the mountains, in the valleys and caves, along the banks of the river, walking accompanied only by my own reflections, meeting with no person to distract my mind, I every day grow more calm. I find Athens, Rome, Florence here, as my imagination desires. Here I enjoy all my friends, the living, and the long dead whom I know only by their works. Here is no tyrant to intimidate, no proud citizen to insult, no wicked tongue to calumniate. Neither quarrels, clamors, lawsuits, nor the din of war reach us here. There are no great lords here to whom court must be paid. Avarice, ambition, and envy left afar, everything breathes joy, freedom, and simplicity." These sentiments were sincere expressions. The apparent inconsistencies with them shown in his life, his frequent intimacies with great personages and brilliant courts, merely prove that there was also another side to his soul; that in spite of his own belief that he was weaned from the public and sick of celebrity, he really had all his life strong desires for congenial society, usefulness, honor and fame.

At the very time that he told the King of Bohemia that his chief desire was 66 to lead a secluded life at its fountain-head among the woods and mountains, and that when he could not go so far to find it, he sought to enjoy it in the midst of cities," he was engaged in composing a "Treatise on Illustrious Men." He wrote letters to Homer, Varro, Cicero, and other great men, as if they were still alive; and said that he strove to forget surrounding vexations by living mentally with the renowned spirits of the past. He went into society to enjoy his friends, to serve his country and the cause of letters, and to win glory. He went into solitude not from dislike or indifference to men, but as an escape from galling_restraints, or from distressing censures and injuries. His sensitiveness to public opinion, even to the most trifling criticism of the most insignificant persons, was excessive in the extreme. His unrivalled celebrity brought his character, his writings, his actions, into all men's mouths. The wretchedness thus caused him was unendurable, and he fled from it to the bosom of nature. He had written "Four Books of Invectives against Physicians," exposing