removed, I may be counselled by the frequent
perusal of these lines and by the thought of my departing years, that
now the time has come to flee from Babylon. This, with God's help, will
be easy when I frankly and manfully consider the needless troubles of
the past with its empty hopes and unexpected issue."

The Babylon to which Petrarch refers was Avignon, then the home of the
popes, which he declares was a place filled with everything fearful that
had ever existed or been conceived by a disordered mind--a veritable
hell on earth. But here he had stayed this quarter of a century, a
captive to the charms of his fair Laura. According to the generally
accepted story, she was of high birth, as her father--Audibert de
Noves--was a noble of Avignon, who died in her infancy, leaving her a
dowry of one thousand gold crowns, which would amount to almost ten
thousand pounds sterling to-day, and which was a splendid marriage
portion for that time. In 1325, two years before her meeting with
Petrarch, she was married to Hugh de Sade, when she was but eighteen;
and while her husband was a man of rank and of an age suited to her own,
it does not appear that he was favored in mind or in body, or that there
was any special affinity between them. In the marriage contract it was
stipulated that her mother and brother were to pay the dower left by the
father and also to bestow upon the bride two gowns for state ceremonies,
one of them to be green, embroidered with violets, and the other of
crimson, with a trimming of feathers. Petrarch frequently alludes to
these gowns, and in the portraits of Laura which have been preserved she
is attired in either one or the other of them. Her personal beauty has
been described in greatest detail by the poet, and it is doubtful if the
features of any other woman and her general characteristics of mind and
body were ever subjected to such minute analysis as is exemplified in
the present instance. Hands and feet, hair, eyes, ears, nose, and
throat--all are depicted in most glowing and appreciative fashion; and,
from the superlative degree of the adjectives, she must indeed have been
fair to look upon and possessed of a great compelling charm. But from
her lovely mouth--_la bella bocca angelica_, as he calls it--there never
came a weak or yielding word in answer to his passionate entreaties. For
this was no mystical love, no such spiritual affection as was felt by
Dante, but the love of an active man of th