Petrarch. O may it indeed be as you have prayed! May God lead me safe and whole out of so many crooked ways; that I may follow the Voice that calls me; that I may raise up no cloud of dust before my eyes; and, with my mind calmed down and at peace, I may hear the world grow still and silent, and the winds of adversity die away.
Francis Petrarch, Poet, Most illustrious Orator; his Book, which he entitled Secretum; in which a Three days' Discussion concerning Contempt of the World is carried on. Finis.
[1] De Senectute, xxiii.
[2] Æneid, i. 428-29.
[3] "Tarda sit illa dies et nostro serior ævo."—Met. xv. 868.
[4] This refers to the second Scipio Africanus, and the words alluded to are these: "It is his goodness that I loved, and that is not dead; it lives not alone for me, who have had it ever before my eyes, but it will go down in all its beauty to those who come after. Whenever a man is meditating some great undertaking, or shall be nourishing in his breast great hopes, his shall be the memory, and his the image that such a man shall take for a pattern."—Cicero, De Amicitiâ, xxvii.
[5] Æneid, i. 328-29.
[6] Cicero, Tusculan Orations, iv. 18.
[7] Quoted from Attilius in Cicero's Letters to Atticus, xiv.
[8] Ovid, Amores, I. x. 13.