it is now
when it truly appears, but what it was long in becoming.

It had no part in the conceptions of Cecco Angioleiri, a poet
contemporaneous, very vulgar, consequently more popular, who "sat" his
heart on a donna and flung at her cries that were squeaks.

Io ho in tal donna lo mio core assiso,
Che chi dicesse: Ti fo imperadore,
E sta che non la veggi per due ore,
Io li direi: Va che to sia ucciso.

Other was Petrarch,

From whose brain-lighted heart were thrown
A thousand thoughts beneath the sun,
Each lucid with the name of One.

The One was Laura. Petrarch, young, good-looking, already aureoled, saw
her first at matins in a church at Avignon. She too was young. Married, a
woman of position, of probable beauty, she was dark-eyed, fair-haired,
pensive, serene. With spells as gossamer as those of the Monna Bice, at
once she imparadised his heart. Precipitately he presented it to her. She
refused it.

Hughes de Sade, her husband, was a perfectly unsympathetic person, jealous
without reason, notoriously hard. Yet his excuse, if he had one, may have
resided in local conditions. Avignon stately and luxurious, was, Petrarch
declared, the gully of every vice. "There is here," he said, "nothing
holy, nothing just, nothing human. Decency and modesty are unknown."[55]

Yet he found them there. Laura represented both. In the profligacy of the
Papal city she at least was pure. She would have none of Petrarch, or,
more exactly, so little that hardly can it be said to count. Rebuffed he
departed. She beckoned him back, rebuffed him again and, alternately, for
twenty-one years, rebuffed and beckoned, preserving his love without
according her own, giving him an infrequent smile, now and then a nod from
a window, on one memorable occasion as much as the touch of her hand. Once
only, and that at their last interview her eyes looked longly in his. That
was all.

To be near her he purchased at Vaucluse an estate so gloomy that his
servants forsook him and where, such women as he saw, it mortified him to
look at. The expression is his own. Day after day he stood before her
gates, which he never entered, fully repaid, if among the orange trees
there, he but caught sight of her. On one occasion he met her by accident,
on another he was fortunate enough to be able to restore a glove which she
had dropped, again in a reunion where were assembled the ladies of
Avignon, a foreign prince marched u