on that a thought or sentiment, however full of
inspiration, must needs undergo to make it palpable, denotes an amount
of conscious effort which detracts in a measure from its apparent
spontaneity. But in spite of the quaint conceits, the frequent play upon
words, the unworthy tricks of speech, the painful sacrifice to rhyme
which occasionally mar his verse, I believe Petrarch was sincere. If he
was only a pretence and a sham, then all the amatory poetry that has
been written since his time, intellectual or analytic, passionate or
sensuous, is a pretence and a sham. Petrarch's utterance must needs have
been founded on truth, else never could it have stood the test of five
centuries, and never would it have assimilated itself, as it has done,
with the poetic speech of an entire race. I know of hardly an English
poet in whose rhymes in the matter of love, and particularly among those
of a narrower range of thought and a lower plane of vision, one cannot
trace in a greater or less degree the influence of Petrarch. Thus, to
me, Petrarch remains the very king of spring-time poets. There are
summer poets, autumn poets and winter poets, but Petrarch was none of
these. Neither his passion nor his poetry ever ripened into summer or
faded into autumn. He will always typify the early youth of love and
song. I can never open his book of sonnets that I do not hear the rustle
of young winds in green boughs, and do not catch the faint sweet odor of
violets and primroses--the violets and primroses that grow on the banks
of the Sorgue in the Vaucluse--the violets and primroses that Laura wore
in her hair when Petrarch saw her kneeling in the church of Santa Chiara
in Avignon, and loved her all at once.

The bright little river Sorgue is here a rushing brook, tumbling and
foaming over the great stones in its bed, and imprisoned between two
green sloping banks covered with low trees and bushes and tendrils of
creeping ivy. It finds birth, this merry, roaring brook, in a dark,
mysterious, shadowy pool, overhung by wild fantastic masses of rock,
which loses itself far back in a dim cavern beneath the cliffs. Black
and motionless, sullen and inscrutable, it lies, this source of the
river Sorgue, a very pool of Lethe, looking as though it knew it drew
its sustenance from the deepest heart of the earth, held communication
with the hidden powers of Nature, and was one at the core with all the
mighty waters of the creation. What a type of the poe