ween a man's earthly love and his spiritual
patron, and made them equally crude, righteous, quaint and angular.

But I felt that these harsh distorted outlines had naught in common with
Petrarch's Laura. For she had golden hair that floated loose in the
breeze and was the prison of enchained and captive Love, and she had
roses, red and white, upon her face, and a throat of snowy purity, and a
smile of such rare gentleness that when she passed them by men said,
"Sure this is an angel come from heaven!" That is the Laura who for
centuries has beamed upon humanity--a sweet, benign, refreshing
presence--from within her lover's sonnets. That is the Laura in whose
reality I believe, but the Laura who lies imprisoned and disguised
behind the grotesque mask of mediaeval art I cannot, will not, recognize.
In Petrarch's utterance I find Laura, a pure spiritual shape in mind and
body and soul; but in her portrait I see only Laura clogged and choked
and bound about with the trammels of early art and the weight of crude,
untruthful detail. Thus, I believe that art at its best is but a dull,
material, mechanical means for the translation or reproduction of
thought and Nature, and that for the swift, living, electric flame of
truth we must refer in all ages and climes to speech pure and
simple--the speech of the poet.

There are many who doubt that the words in which Petrarch clothed his
love for Laura were words of sincerity and truth, and who blame his
fatal tendency to utilize every incident and feeling connected with her.
Unquestionably, there was a strong element of earthliness, a dilution of
the pure essence of his affection, in much that Petrarch wrote. It could
hardly have chanced otherwise with a man into whose life worldly
intercourse entered so largely. There must have been times when the pure
light of revelation was hidden from him, and he unknowingly supplied its
place with fancies of a lower kind. His experiences as he met them one
by one were, I doubt not, faithfully and sincerely treated, but after
they had fallen into the past he was enabled to view them by the cold
strong light of the intellect, and the instincts of his nature led him
to incorporate them in verse. It has always been a concomitant of the
poetic character, except perhaps in those lofty organizations whose
utterances are revelations, to regard its own personality objectively
and treat it as material for expression in speech. The very
word-crystallizati