radise are enchaliced in their hearts. Few flowers can boast such high
and haughty lineage as these, the bright posterity of those transfigured
love-tokens of centuries past. They are glorified for ever by
association with the highest, purest phase of human relation. They have
reached the apotheosis of flowerhood--the highest destiny vouchsafed to
aught that grows. They have become one with thought in immortality.

In the heart of the little garden stands a laurel tree, a shoot from
Petrarch's own sacred laurel tree. More young shoots and saplings are
springing up about it, all issuing from the great root that lies deep
underground--the root of five hundred years ago; and the tree
overshadows all the garden and the little crystal brook that sparkles
along by the side of the wall. As I gazed at the stately shape, with its
shining black berries and its glossy dark leaves, I knew that I had
found the keynote to much of Petrarch's music--not always that of his
best and most inspired moods. The resemblance of the name of Laura to
the _laurel_; the antique fable of the transformation of Daphne into a
laurel, and its adoption by Apollo as his emblem; the old superstition
that the laurel was shielded against thunderbolts; his desire to win the
laurel crown as the guerdon of his pains, both amorous and poetic,--were
chains of tradition and convention which Petrarch had not strength to
break, pompous, meaningless hieroglyphics which he felt it his duty to
interpret to men, hinderances and trammels to the development of his
genius. The laurel tree of Petrarch's garden is a fair type of one
phase of the poet's own speech, prone to derive its significance from
extraneous sources and overloaded with borrowed metaphor. But the laurel
receives a new meaning if we picture to ourselves Madonna Laura
reclining in its shadow on the banks of the little river, with flowers
scattered all about her garments and little Loves disporting in the air
about her wreathed head. Then it becomes instinct with life and
vitality, and we wonder why Petrarch deemed it needful to resort to the
dead and withered husks of antique fable for what lay there at his own
cottage-door, and waited but to be lifted from the sod--a wealth of
poetic illustration and conceit.

Since the day when I made the memory of the Vaucluse my own, I have read
how a great festival was held there in the summer-tide in honor of
Petrarch. I have read how they came, those intellectual de