e weak,
his heart seemed to stop and he leaned against a pillar for support.
That night he eased his soul with a sonnet.

To his great embarrassment he found he had not mastered his passion--it
was now mastering him. He tells us all this at length, and he told it to
Laura, too.

His health began to decline, and his physician advised that he move to
the country. And so we find him taking a course of solitude as a cure
for love. He moved to Vaucluse, a hamlet fifteen miles from the city.
Some of the old-time biographies tried to show that Laura visited him
there in his solitude, and that was the reason he lived there. It is now
believed that such stories were written for the delectation of the
Hearst Syndicate, and had no basis in fact. The only way Petrarch ever
really met Laura was in imagination.

Boccaccio, a contemporary and friend of Petrarch, declared that Laura
had no existence outside of the imagination of the poet. But Boccaccio
was a poet with a roistering proclivity, and truth to such a one in a
love-affair is out of the question. Lies and love, with a certain
temperament, go hand in hand. Possibly the absurd position of modern
civilization towards the love-emotions has much to do with this. We have
held that in human love there was something essentially base and bad,
and so whenever a man or a woman become involved in Cupid's meshes they
are sudden and quick in swearing an alibi, no matter what the nature of
the attachment may be.

Boccaccio had to defend himself continually from charges, which most
people knew were true, and so by habit he grew to deny everything, not
only for himself, but for his friends. The poet needs solitude and
society, in right proportions of course.

Petrarch lived at Vaucluse for ten years, making occasional trips to
various capitals. Of his solitary life he says:

Here at Vaucluse I make war upon my senses, and treat them as my
enemies. My eyes, which have drawn me into a thousand difficulties,
see no longer either gold or precious stones, or ivory, or purple;
they behold nothing save the water, the firmament and the rocks. The
only female who comes within their sight is a swarthy old woman, dry
and parched as the Lybian deserts. My ears are no longer courted by
those harmonious instruments and voices which have so transported my
soul; they hear nothing but the lowing of the cattle, the bleating
of the sheep, the warbling of the birds, and