Petrarch beheld the loveliness and sweetness of the young beauty, and was transfixed. He sought acquaintance with her; and while the manners of the times prevented his entering her house[31], he enjoyed many opportunities of meeting her in society, and of conversing with her. He would have declared his love, but her reserve enforced silence. "She opened my breast," he writes, "and took my heart into her hand, saying, 'Speak no word of this.'" Yet the reverence inspired by her modesty and dignity was not always sufficient to restrain her lover: being alone with her, and she appearing more gracious than usual, Petrarch, on one occasion, tremblingly and fearfully confessed his passion, but she, with altered looks, replied, "I am not the person you take me for!" Her displeasure froze the very heart of the poet, so that he fled from her presence in grief and dismay.[32]
No attentions on his part could make any impression on her steady and virtuous mind. While love and youth drove him on, she remained impregnable and firm; and when she found that he still rushed wildly forward, she preferred forsaking, to following him to the precipice down which he would have hurried her. Meanwhile, as he gazed on her angelic countenance, and saw purity painted on it, his love grew as spotless as herself. Love transforms the true lover into a resemblance of the object of his passion. In a town, which was the asylum of vice, calumny never breathed a taint upon Laura's name: her actions, her words, the very expression of her countenance, and her slightest gestures were replete with a modest reserve combined with sweetness, and won the applause of all.[33]
The passion of Petrarch was purified and exalted at the same time. Laura filled him with noble aspirations, and divided him from the common herd. He felt that her influence made him superior to vulgar ambition; and rendered him wise, true, and great. She saved him in the dangerous period of youth, and gave a worthy aim to all his endeavours. The manners of his age permitted one solace; a Platonic attachment was the fashion of the day. The troubadours had each his lady to adore, to wait upon, and to celebrate in song; without its being supposed that she made him any return beyond a gracious acceptance of his devoirs, and the allowing him to make her the heroine of his verses. Petrarch endeavoured to merge the living passion of his soul into this airy and unsubstantial devotion. Laura permitted the homage: she perceived his merit, and was proud of his admiration; she felt the truth of his affection, and indulged the wish of preserving it and her own honour at the same time. Without her inflexibility, this had been a dangerous experiment: but she always kept her lover distant from her: rewarding his reserve by smiles, and repressing by frowns all the overflowings of his heart.
By her resolute severity, she incurred the danger of ceasing to be the object of his attachment, and of losing the gift of an immortal name, which he has conferred upon her. But Petrarch's constancy was proof against hopelessness and time. He had too fervent an admiration of her qualities, ever to change: he controlled the vivacity of his feelings, and they became deeper rooted. The struggle cost him his peace of mind. From the moment that love had seized upon his heart, the tenor of his life was changed. He fed upon tears, and took a fatal pleasure in complaints and sighs; his nights became sleepless, and the beloved name dwelt upon his lips during the hours of darkness. He desired death, and sought solitude, devouring there his own heart. He grew pale and thin, and the flower of youth faded before its time. The day began and closed in sorrow; the varieties of her behaviour towards him alone imparted joy or grief, he strove to flee and to forget; but her memory became, and for ever remained, the ruling law of his existence.[34]
From this time his poetic life is dated. He probably composed verses before he saw Laura; but none have been preserved except such as celebrate his passion. How soon, after seeing her, he began thus to pour forth his full heart, cannot be told; probably love, which turns the man of the most prosaic temperament into a versifier, impelled him, at its birth, to give harmonious expression to the rush of thought and feeling that it created. Latin was in use among the learned; but ladies, unskilled in a dead language, were accustomed to be sung by the Troubadours in their native Provençal dialect. Petrarch loved Italy, and all things Italian—he perceived the melody, the grace, the earnestness, which it could embody. The residence of the popes at Avignon caused it to be generally understood; and in the language of his native Florence, the poet addressed his lady, though she was born under a less favoured sky. His sonnets and canzoni obtained the applause they deserved: they became popular: and he, no doubt, hoped that the description of his misery, his admiration, his almost idolatry, would gain him favour in Laura's heart.
Petrarch had always a great predilection for travelling: the paucity of books rendered this a mode,—in his eyes, almost the only mode,—for the attainment of the knowledge for which his nature craved. The first journey he made after his return from Bologna, was to accompany Giacomo Colonna on his visit to the diocese of Lombes, of which he had lately been installed bishop. Lombes is a small town of Languedoc, not far from Thoulouse; it had been erected into a bishopric by pope John XXII., who conferred it on Giacomo Colonna, in recompence of an act of intrepid daring successfully achieved in his behalf. 1330.
Ætat.
26. It was the summer season, and the travellers proceeded through the most picturesque part of France, among the Pyrenees, to the banks of the Garonne. Besides Petrarch, the bishop was accompanied by Lello, the son of Pietro Stefani, a Roman gentleman; and a Frenchman named Louis. The friendship that Petrarch formed with both, on this occasion, continued to the end of their lives: many of his familiar letters are addressed to them under the appellations of Lælius and Socrates; for Petrarch's contempt of his own age gave him that tinge of pedantry which caused him to confer on his favourites the names of the ancients. Lello was a man of education and learning; he had long lived under the protection of the Colonna family, by the members of which he was treated as a son or brother. The transalpine birth of Louis made Petrarch call him a barbarian; but he found him cultivated and refined, endowed with a lively imagination, a gay temper, and addicted to music and poetry. In the society of these men, Petrarch passed a divine summer; it was one of those periods in his life, towards which his thoughts frequently turned in after-times with yearning and regret.[35]
On his return from Lombes, Petrarch became an inmate in the house of cardinal Colonna. He had leisure to indulge in his taste for literature: he was unwearied in the labour of discovering, collating, and copying ancient manuscripts. To him we owe the preservation of many Latin authors, which, buried in the dust of monastic libraries, and endangered by the ignorance of their monkish possessors, had been wholly lost to the world, but for the enthusiasm and industry of a few learned men, among whom Petrarch ranks pre-eminent. He thought no toil burthensome, however arduous, which drew from oblivion these monuments of former wisdom. Often he would not trust to the carelessness of copyists, but transcribed these works with his own hand. His library was lost to the world, after his death, through the culpable negligence of the republic of Venice, to which he had given it; but there still exists, in the Laurentian library of Florence, the orations of Cicero, and his letters to Atticus in Petrarch's handwriting.
His ardour for acquiring knowledge was unbounded,—the society of a single town, and the few hooks that he possessed, could not satisfy him. He believed that travelling was the best school for learning. His great desire was to visit Rome; and a journey hither was projected by him and the bishop of Lombes. Delays intervening, which prevented their immediate departure, Petrarch made the tour of France, Flanders, and Brabant: 1331.
Ætat.
27. "For which journey," he says, "whatever cause may have been alleged, the real motive was a fervent desire of extending my experience."[36] He first visited Paris, and took pleasure in satisfying himself of the truth or falsehood of the accounts he had heard of that city. His curiosity was insatiable; when the day did not suffice, he devoted the night to his enquiries. He found the city ill built and disagreeable, but he was pleased with the inhabitants; describing them, as a traveller might of the present day, as gay, and fond of society; facile and animated in conversation, and amiable in their assemblies and feasts; eager in their search after amusement, and driving away care by pleasure; prompt to discover and to ridicule the faults of others, and covering their own with a thick veil.[37]
From Paris, Petrarch continued his travels through Liege, Aix-la-Chapelle, and Cologne. In all places he searched for ancient manuscripts. At Liege he discovered two orations of Cicero, but could not find any one capable of copying them in the whole town: it was with difficulty that he procured some yellow and pale ink, with which he transcribed them himself.[38] From Cologne he turned his steps homeward, passing through Ardennes on his way to Lyons. His heart warmed at the expectation of returning to his friends; and the image of Laura took possession of his imagination. Whilst wandering alone through the wild forest, which armed men feared to traverse, no idea of danger occurred to him; love occupied all his thoughts: the form of Laura flitted among the trees; and the waving branches, and the song of birds, and the murmuring streams, made her movements and her voice present to his senses with all the liveliness of reality. Twilight closed in, and imparted a portion of dismay, till, emerging from the dark trees, he beheld the Rhone, which threaded the plains towards the native town of the lady of his love; and at sight of the familiar river, a joyous rapture took place of gloom. Two of the most graceful of his sonnets were written to describe the fantastic images that haunted him as he traversed the forest, and the kindling of his soul when, emerging from its depths, he was, as it were serenely welcomed by the delightful country and beloved river which appeared before him.[39]
At Lyons a disappointment awaited him: he met, on his arrival, a servant of the Colonna family, whom he eagerly questioned concerning his friends; and heard, to his infinite mortification, that Giacomo had departed for Italy, without waiting for his return. Deeply hurt by this apparent neglect, he wrote a letter to the bishop, full of bitter reproaches, which he enclosed to cardinal Colonna, to be forwarded to his brother; while he delayed somewhat his homeward journey, spending some weeks at Lyons. He was absent from Avignon, on this occasion, scarcely more than three months.