ardened into senseless form and matter; and the law
of his own mind forbade his pledging himself irrevocably to what in one
mood seemed highest and most precious, but what another mood might
contradict and openly defy. He knew that, although that ascetic temper
which took possession of his soul at times when his genius was loudest,
most clamorous, most importunate, was the basis of all monastic
principle, he might not imprison it, fleeting, evanescent, within the
dungeons of vows and formalism. And to-day, no less than in Petrarch's
time, the same spirit walks the earth, shines through the actions and
speech of all high souls, and yet refuses to bind itself to dull
external shows and symbols.

If Petrarch had not withdrawn himself to the solitude of the Vaucluse, I
doubt if we should know more of his passion for Laura to-day than could
be told in a score of sonnets. For with his mind overloaded by the
sights and sounds and honors that were heaped upon him, he never could
have separated her from the contingent circumstances that surrounded
their intercourse in Avignon. But there, on the banks of the Sorgue, he
viewed her image from afar, dismissed all the attendant episodes of
palace and revel, court and council, and beheld only the ideal--or
rather the real--Laura in her own worth and significance. Surely, never
was there verse through which showed so plainly the Nature under whose
auspices it was brought forth as those songs of Petrarch. I seem to feel
that they were written in solitude, not sublime, but pleasing, and in a
narrow valley shut out from contemplation of aught else. And I know, as
I leave the Vaucluse behind me, how deep a hold the memory of the loved
fountain must needs have taken upon the poet's mind, for I too have made
me a picture of a river, and a grotto, and a shadowy pool, and a low
brown house, and a stately laurel tree, which will always live in my
sense. And these things resolve themselves into one with a few scattered
sonnets, and a shadowy gold-haired form, and a handful of sweet small
roses, and, lo! I have made incarnate and have bound fast to me for ever
that beautiful old-time idyl of the Vaucluse.

CHARLOTTE ADAMS.

A "TARTAR FIGHT" AT KAZAN, AND HOW IT WAS STOPPED.

Rooshia? Why, yes, I ought to know something about Rooshia, seein' I've
lived there, off and on, this fifteen year and more; and if a young man
was to come to me and ax me where's the best place for a workin' man t