Here we have happiness and misery felt in the modern way, and Nature in the modern way drawn into the circle of thought and feeling, and personified.
Petrarch was the first, since the days of Hellenism, to enjoy the pleasures of solitude quite consciously.
How often to my darling place of rest,
Fleeing from all, could I myself but flee,
I walk and wet with tears my path and breast.
(Sonnet 240.)
He shared Schiller's thought:
Oh Nature is perfect, wherever we stray,
'Tis man that deforms it with care.
As love from thought to thought, from hill to hill,