PETRARCH.

“Chi vuol veder quantunque può natura.”

Thou that wouldst mark, in form of human birth,

All heaven and nature’s perfect skill combined,

Come gaze on her, the day-star of the earth,

Dazzling, not me alone, but all mankind:

And haste! for Death, who spares the guilty long,

First calls the brightest and the best away;

And to her home, amidst the cherub throng,

The angelic mortal flies, and will not stay!

Haste! and each outward charm, each mental grace,

In one consummate form thine eye shall trace,

Model of loveliness, for earth too fair!

Then thou shalt own how faint my votive lays,

My spirit dazzled by perfection’s blaze:

But if thou still delay, for long regret prepare.

If to the sighing breeze of summer hours

Bend the green leaves; if mourns a plaintive bird;

Or from some fount’s cool margin, fringed with flowers,

The soothing murmur of the wave is heard;

Her whom the heavens reveal, the earth denies,

I see and hear: though dwelling far above,

Her spirit, still responsive to my sighs,

Visits the lone retreat of pensive love.

“Why thus in grief consume each fruitless day,”

(Her gentle accents thus benignly say,)

“While from thine eyes the tear unceasing flows?

Weep not for me, who, hastening on my flight,

Died, to be deathless; and on heavenly light

Whose eyes but open’d, when they seem’d to close!”