cterizes them
as "superstitions." The great poet was sixty-five years old when he
came to rest at Arqua, and when, in his own pathetic words, "there
remained to him only to consider and to desire how to make a good
end." He says further, at the close of his autobiography: "In one of
the Euganean hills, near to ten miles from the city of Padua, I have
built me a house, small but pleasant and decent, in the midst of
slopes clothed with vines and olives, abundantly sufficient for a
family not large and discreet. Here I lead my life, and although, as I
have said, infirm of body, yet tranquil of mind, without excitements,
without distractions, without cares, reading always, and writing and
praising God, and thanking God as well for evil as for good; which
evil, if I err not, is trial merely and not punishment. And all the
while I pray to Christ that he make good the end of my life, and
have mercy on me, and forgive me, and even forget my youthful sins;
wherefore, in this solitude, no words are so sweet to my lips as
these of the psalm: '_Delicta juventutis meoe, et ignorantias meas ne
memineris_.' And with every feeling of the heart I pray God, when it
please Him, to bridle my thoughts, so long unstable and erring; and
as they have vainly wandered to many things, to turn them all to
Him--only true, certain, immutable Good."

I venerate the house at Arqua because these sweet and solemn words
were written in it. We left its revered shelter (after taking a final
look from the balcony down upon "the slopes clothed with vines and
olives") and returned to the lower village, where, in the court of the
little church, we saw the tomb of Petrarch--"an ark of red stone, upon
four columns likewise of marble." The epitaph is this:--

"Frigida Francisci lapis hic tegit ossa Petrarcae;
Suscipe, Virgo parens, animam; sate Virgine, parce
Fessaque jam terris Coeli requiescat in arce."

A head of the poet in bronze surmounts the ark. The housekeeper of the
parish priest, who ran out to enjoy my admiration and bounty, told me
a wild local tradition of an attempt on the part of the Florentines
to steal the bones of Petrarch away from Arqua, in proof of which
she showed me a block of marble set into the ark, whence she said a
fragment had been removed by the Florentines. This local tradition I
afterwards found verified, with names and dates, in a little "Life of
Petrarch," by F. Leoni, published at Padua in 1843. It appears that
this cu