ne pertinacity. Here are you, week after week, month after month----"

"I know it--know all you would say.--Good God! how beautiful she is!"

"Here are you--for I _will_ speak."--continued his youthful but grave
associate, "who are simply the most perfect cavalier in all Bologna--(one
would not flatter, but this physic is, in some cases, absolutely
necessary)--at once the boast and envy of the whole university--wasting,
consuming yourself away, in a perpetual fever after the only woman, I
take it upon me to declare----"

"Psha! psha! Tell me, if you would have me listen, what further can I
_do_? I have wooed her in sonnets, which ought to have affected her, for
Petrarch polished the verse. Nothing touches her. She is as obdurate as
steel. Not a smile--not, at least, for me--and for all others she smiles
how sweetly, how intelligently, how divinely! But by the Holy Cross! she
_shall_ love me! Petrarch, she shall!--she shall!"

"My dear Giacomo, you rave. Be a _little_ reasonable. Lover as you are,
stay on this side of madness. Love on--if it must be so--love her for
ever; but do not for ever be striving for a return of your passion. Take
home your unrequited love into your bosom--nourish it there--but do not
exasperate it by a bootless and incessant struggle against fate. For my
part, I can conceive there may be a strange sweet luxury in this solitary
love that lives in one breast alone. It is all your own. It is fed,
kindled, diversified, sustained by your own imagination. It is passion
without the gross thraldom of circumstance. It is the pure relation of
soul to soul, without the vast, intricate, unmanageable relationship of
life to life."

"To you, a poet," replied Giacomo with a slight tone of sarcasm, "such a
passion may be possible. Perhaps you care not for more heat than serves to
animate and make fluent the verse. Pleased with the glow of fancy and of
feeling, you can stop short of possession. I cannot! Oh, you poets! you
fuse your passion with your genius: you describe, you do not feel."

"Not feel!" exclaimed Petrarch "we cannot then describe."

"Oh, yes! you can describe. You fling the golden light of imagination,
like a light from heaven, round the object of your adoration; but, in
return, the real woman is translated herself to the skyey region of
imagination. She becomes the creature of your thoughts. You are conscious
that the glory you have flung around her, you can re-assume. Petrarch,
Petrarch! i