bauchees, and
rioted and revelled and wrangled and jarred, and poisoned the chaste,
calm waters of the sacred river with the hot fumes of literary
dissension and argument. I have read how they came, with their heads
full of quotations and their notebooks full of impressions and hints for
effective rhapsody--how they feasted on the silver trout of the Sorgue,
and gathered Laura's roses to adorn their buttonholes, and stripped the
consecrated laurel of its leaves to make garlands for their own dull
heads, and poured forth international compliments, and glorified one
another, and hugged themselves for delight at their fine comprehension
of the poet, and fell on their knees before him, and immolated their
individual hearts and souls at the shrine of his genius; and, lo! there
was not a true appreciater of Petrarch among them all! The right
appraiser of Petrarch has been there before and since, but he was not
there then. The noise and the bustle and the wisdom of the multitude
held him aloof, and he waited until a more convenient season. He comes
by preference in the spring-time, knowing that then Nature and Petrarch
sing in unison. He is a poet, because it takes a poet to understand a
poet, no less than a hero a hero. He is of such simple, foolish mould
that when he thinks there is no one near to spy him out he casts himself
down upon the sod and kisses it with all tenderness, and caresses the
daisies with his finger-tips, greeting them as his younger brethren; for
there is something stirring in him which draws him nearer to earth's
heart than other men, and he loves to dwell upon his common origin with
flower and leaf. He does not fall down and worship Petrarch, because he
knows that Petrarch is only one expression of the great power that lives
behind all thought and speech--one part of the great whole that lies
spread out before him on the river and the cliff. But he takes the old
poet by the hand and looks straight into his eyes, and reads there what
is written in his own heart, and says, "We twain are brethren and
friends, sovereign and equal, for evermore."

If Petrarch had lived earlier in the centuries of Christianity, he would
have been a monk. His genius would have found expression in the
cloister-life, for the first monks were poets and philosophers. But he
lived at a period when that beautiful principle of asceticism was no
longer at one with genius. The fine essence of spirituality was gone
from it, and it had h