Here, in his beloved retreat, the poet seems to have perpetually tormented himself with reflections about the vanity of life and the folly of human affections, as if the stern figure of his monitor were indeed still shadowing his spirit. But the saint, for all his arguments, cannot conquer the poet's nature, or free him from what he calls the adamantine chains that bind him to Love and Fame.
"These charm while they destroy," he makes the saint declare.
"What have I done to you?" Petrarch exclaims, "that you should deprive me of my most splendid preoccupations and condemn to eternal darkness the brightest part of my soul?"
It is in the grip of his splendid preoccupations that one sees him oftenest.
Petrarch's parents were forced to leave Florence, where his father was a notary, by the same revolution that exiled Dante, and after some wanderings they fixed themselves at Avignon, sending the poet to study jurisprudence at Montpellier, close at hand. It was on his return to the Papal city, after the death of his parents, that he saw Laura for the first time.
Judging by the sonnets, he met her fairly often afterwards in Avignon, but never with any hope of a return for his passion.
A glance, a word of greeting at most, were all his reward, but out of these he appears to have woven a sort of painful joy. His was an unquiet spirit. One feels it as almost a relief to read of his death and of his peaceful tomb at Arqua in the Euganæan hills above a clear and beautiful river. "It stands on the little square before the church where the peasants congregate at Mass-time—open to the skies, girdled by the hills and within hearing of the vocal stream."
It is a pathetic picture that is left in the mind at the last, as the poet writes from the sweet solitude of his garden at Parma, whither he had retired towards the end of his days, drawn, doubtless, to his native land, for which he had always a profound attachment.
"I pass my life in the church or in my garden," he says. The words are so simple and quiet, and yet they are infinitely pathetic. When one remembers what a centre of emotion and longing and sorrow the human heart must be from its very nature, and what a stormy, ambitious, loving and suffering spirit Petrarch's had always been, the quietness of those words and the picture they call up is more touching and significant than a hundred homilies. One knows a little now what sort of thoughts used to pass through the poet's mind, as he bent his steps towards the great painted chambers where his entry brought to all quick nerves a touch of sunshine and a wave of harmony.
Barbara gave a little laugh as we ascended the broad whitewashed staircase, once rich with colour, that led to the endless galleries of this leviathan of a palace.