"E'en as the stricken deer, that unaware
Rooming afar in pleasant groves of Crete,
The hunter pierces with his weapon keen.
And she unknowing o'er Mount Dicte's side
Flees wounded, and the fatal arrow cleaves
To her poor side."[27]
I am even as that deer. I have fled, but I bear everywhere my wound with me.
S. Augustine. Yourself have given me the answer for which you look.
Petrarch. How so?
S. Augustine. Why, do you not see that if a man bears his wound with him, change of scone is but an aggravation of his pain and not a means of healing it? One might say your case is just that of the young man who complained to Socrates that he had been a tour and it had done him no good whatever. "You went touring with yourself,"[28] said the Sage.
You must first break off the old load of your passions; you must make your soul ready. Then you must fly. For it is proved to demonstration, not only in things physical but in moral also, that unless the patient is well disposed, the doctor's help is in vain. Otherwise were you to go to the far-off Indies, you will find that Horace only spoke truth when he said—
"Who cross the ocean making peace their goal,
Change but their sky and cannot change their soul."
Or thus—
"We come to this; when o'er the world we range,
'Tis but our climate, not our mind, we change."[29]
Petrarch. I must say I cannot follow you. You give me a prescription to cure and heal my soul and tell me I must first heal it and then flee. Now, my difficulty is I do not know how to heal it. If it is cured, what more do I need? But if, again, it is not cured, what good will change of scene bring me? The help you offer me is useless. Tell me briefly what are the remedies I must use?