ince the days of antiquity
who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how country
scenery affected him; yet his pastoral romances show his imagination to
have been filled with it.

But the significance of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and
clearly displayed by Petrarch--one of the first truly modern men. That
clear soul--who first collected from the literature of all countries
evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of natural beauty, and
himself, in his _Ansichten der Natur_, achieved the noblest masterpiece
of description--Alexander von Humboldt, has not done full justice to
Petrarch; and, following in the steps of the great reaper, we may still
hope to glean a few ears of interest and value.

Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of Italy
is said to have been drawn by his direction--and not only a reproducer
of the sayings of the ancients, but felt himself the influence of
natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the favorite
accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the two that
he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from
time to time fled from the world and from his age. We should do him
wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of describing
natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture, for
instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he
inserts at the end of the sixth book of the _Africa_, for the reason
that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it, is no more than a
simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his friends of
Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly lingered,
are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also conscious of
the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the
picturesqueness from the utility of nature. During his stay among the
woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected
him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside. But the deepest
impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of Mont Ventoux, near
Avignon. An indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger and
stronger in him, till at length the accidental sight of a passage in
Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Haemus, decided
him. He thought that what was not blamed in a gray-headed monarch might
be well excused in a young man of private