Solitude / With the Life of the Author. In Two Parts

by Johann Georg Zimmermann

It was at the feet of those rocks which overhung the celebrated retreat at Vaucluse, that Petrarch composed his finest sonnets to deplore the absence, or to complain of the cruelty of his beloved Laura. The Italians are of opinion, that when love inspired his muse, his poetry soared far beyond that of any poet who ever wrote before or since his time, either in the Greek, the Latin, or the Tuscan languages. “Ah! how soft and tender is this language of the heart!” they exclaim. “Petrarch alone was acquainted with its power: he has added to the three graces a fourth—the grace of delicacy.”

Love, however, when indulged in rural solitude or amidst the romantic scenery of an ancient castle, and, assisted by the ardent imagination of impetuous youth, frequently assumes a more bold and violent character. Religious enthusiasm, blended with a saturnine disposition, forms, in effervescent minds, a sublime and extraordinary compound of the feelings of the heart. A youthful lover of this description, when deprived of the smiles of his mistress, takes his first declaration of love from the text of the apocalypse and thinks his passion an eternal melancholy; but when he is inclined to sharpen the dart within his breast, his inspired mind views in the beloved object the fairest model of divine perfection.

The lovers of this romantic cast, placed in some ancient solitary castle, soar far beyond the common tribe, and, as their ideas refine, their passions become proportionably sublime. Surrounded by stupendous rocks, and impressed by the awful stilness of the scene, the beloved youth is considered not merely as an amiable and virtuous man, but as a god. The inspired mind of the fond female fancies her bosom to be the sanctuary of love, and conceives her affection for the youthful idol of her heart to be an emanation from heaven: a ray of the Divine Presence. Ordinary lovers, without doubt, in spite of absence, unite their souls, write by every post, seize all occasions to converse with, or hear from, each other; but our more sublime and exalted female introduces into her romance of passion every butterfly she meets with, and all the feathered songsters of the groves; and, except in the object of her love, no longer sees any thing as it really is. Reason and sense no longer guide: the refinements of love direct all her movements; she tears the world from its poles, and the sun from its axis; and to prove that all she does is right, establishes for herself and her lover a new gospel, and a new system of morality.

A lover, separated, perhaps, forever, from a mistress who has made the most important sacrifices to his happiness; who was his only consolation in affliction, his only comfort in calamity; whose kindness supported his sinking fortitude; who remained his faithful and his only friend in dire adversity and domestic sorrow; seeks, as his sole resource, a slothful solitude. Nights passed in sleepless agonies; a distaste of life, a desire of death, an abhorrence of all society, and a love of dreary seclusion, drive him, day, after day, wandering, as chance may direct, though the most solitary retirements far from the hated traces of mankind. Were he, however, to wander from the Elbe to the lake of Geneva; were he to seek relief in the frozen confines of the north, or the burning regions of the west, to the utmost extremities of the earth or seas, he would still be like the hind described by Virgil:

“Stung with the stroke and madding with the pain

She wildly flies from wood to wood in vain;

Shoots o’er the Cretan lawn with many a bound,

The cleaving dart still rankling in the wound.”

Petrarch, on returning to Vaucluse, felt with new and increasing stings the passion which perturbed his breast. Immediately on his arrival at this sequestered spot, the image of his beloved Laura incessantly haunted his imagination. He beheld her at all times, in every place, and under a thousand different forms. “Three times in the middle of the night when every door was closed, she appeared to me,” says he, “at the feet of my bed, with a steadfast look, as if confident of the power of her charms. Fear spread a chilling dew over all my limbs. My blood thrilled through my veins towards my heart. If any one had then entered my apartment with a candle, they would have beheld me as pale as death, with every mark of terror on my face. Rising before the break of day, with trembling limbs, from my disordered bed, and hastily leaving my house, where every thing created alarm, I climbed to the summit of the rocks, and ran wildly through the woods, casting my eyes incessantly on every side, to see if the form which had haunted my repose, still pursued me. Alas! I could find no asylum. Places the most sequestered, where I fondly flattered myself that I should be alone, presented her continually to my mind; and I beheld her sometimes issuing from the hollow trunk of a tree, from the concealed source of a spring, or from the dark cavity of a broken rock. Fear rendered me insensible, and I neither know what I did, or where I went.”