Tal paura ho di ritrovarmi solo!
He endeavours to maintain in her presence that self-constraint she had enjoined. He assumes a cold and calm deportment, and Laura, as she passes him, whispers in a tone of gentle reproach, "Petrarch! are you so soon weary of loving me?" (ten or eleven years of adoration were, in truth, nothing—to signify!) At length, he resolved to leave Laura and Avignon for ever; and instead of plunging into solitude, to seek the wiser resource of travel and society. He announced this intention to Laura, and bade her a long farewell; either through surprise, or grief, or the fear of losing her glorious captive, she turned exceedingly pale, a cloud overspread her beautiful countenance, and she fixed her eyes on the ground. This was to her lover an intoxicating moment; in the exultation of sudden delight, he interpreted these symptoms of relenting, this "vago impallidir," too favourably to himself. "She bent those gentle eyes upon the earth, which in their sweet silence said,—to me at least they seemed to say,—'who takes my faithful friend so far from me?'"
Chinava a terra il bel guardo gentile,
E tacendo dicea, com' a me parve—
"Chi m'allontana il mio fedele amico?"
On his return to Avignon, a few months afterwards, Laura received him with evident pleasure; but he is not, therefore, more avançé; all this was probably the refined coquetterie of a woman of calm passions; but not heartless, not really indifferent to the devotion she inspired, nor ungrateful for it.
Petrarch has himself left us a most minute and interesting description of the whole course of Laura's conduct towards him, which by a beautiful figure of poetry he has placed in her own mouth. The passage occurs in the Trionfo di Morte, beginning, "La notte che segui l'orribil caso."
The apparition of Laura descending on the morning dew, bright as the opening dawn, and crowned with Oriental gems,
Di gemme orientali incoronata,
appears before her lover, and addresses him with compassionate tenderness. After a short dialogue, full of poetic beauty and noble thoughts,[34] Petrarch conjures her, in the name of heaven and of truth, to tell him whether the pity she sometimes expressed for him was allied to love? for that the sweetness she mingled with her disdain and reserve—the soft looks with which she tempered her anger, had left him for long years in doubt of her real sentiments, still doating, still suspecting, still hoping without end:
Creovvi amor pensier mai nella testa,
D' aver pietà del mio lungo martire
Non lasciando vostr' alta impresa onestà?