but when
the white heat of passion has passed, and hangs as a beautiful picture
on memory's walls, the artist may write his poem. If the best writers of
love-poetry have never loved, at least they have been capable of loving,
or they could not make the reader feel. Appreciation is necessary to
production. But Petrarca was such a poet as Cleone refers to. He was
happy to be theoretically miserable, that he might indite sonnets to an
unrequited passion: and who is not sensible of their insincerity? One is
inclined to include Dante in the same category, though far higher in
degree. Landor, however, has conceived the existence of a truly ardent
affection between Dante and Beatrice, and it was my good fortune to hear
him read this beautiful imaginary conversation. To witness the aged poet
throwing the pathos of his voice into the pathos of his intellect, his
eyes flooded with tears, was a scene of uncommon interest. "Ah!" said
he, while closing the book, "I never wrote anything half as good as
that, and I never can read it that the tears do not come." Landor's
voice must have been exceedingly rich and harmonious, as it then (1861)
possessed much fulness. This was the first and only time I ever heard
him read aloud one of his own Conversations.

* * * * *

Petrarch and Boccaccio were highly esteemed by Landor, who did not
sympathize with Lord Chesterfield in his opinion that the former
deserved his _Laura_ better than his _lauro_. The best evidence of this
predilection is Landor's great work, "The Pentemeron," second only to
his greatest, "Pericles and Aspasia." Its _couleur locale_ is
marvellous. On every page there is a glimpse of cloudless blue sky, a
breath of warm sunny air, a sketch of Italian manner. The masterly
_gusto_ with which the author enters into the spirit of Italy would
make us believe him to be "the noblest Roman of them all," had he not
proved himself a better Grecian. Margaret Fuller realized this when,
after comparing the Pentemeron and Petrarca together, she wrote: "I find
the prose of the Englishman worthy of the verse of the Italian. It is a
happiness to see such marble beauty in the halls of a contemporary."

* * * * *

I gave evidence of great surprise one day upon hearing Landor express
himself warmly in favor of Alfieri, as I had naturally concluded, from a
note appended to the Conversation between "Galileo, Milton, and a
Dominican,"