The question of Laura’s identity will be best considered along with the poems devoted to her praise and her adorer’s passion. Neither love nor society, meanwhile, kept Petrarch from letters, and his reputation waxed daily. He displayed a happy faculty for maintaining relations with the great, equally honourable to both parties, exempt alike from presumption and servility. In 1330 he spent a considerable time with Bishop Colonna at his Pyrenean diocese of Lombès, and on his return was formally enrolled as a member of the Cardinal’s household. His residence at Avignon made him known to the learned English prelate, Richard de Bury, and other distinguished visitors at the Papal Court, and he began to enjoy the favour of Robert, King of Naples. His vernacular poetry, though far inferior to that which he was destined to produce, was nevertheless making him and Laura famous, for he exclaims in an early sonnet:
Blest all songs and music that have spread
Her laud afar.
he made a journey to Paris, Belgium, and the Rhine, of which he has given us a lively account in his correspondence, and which produced at least one sonnet which showed that by this time he wanted but little of perfection:
Through wild inhospitable woods I rove
Where fear attends even on the soldier’s way,
Dreadless of ill; for nought can me affray
Saving that Sun which shines by light of Love:
And chant, as idly carolling I move,
Her, whom not Heaven itself can keep away,
Borne in my eyes; and ladies I survey
Encircling her, who oaks and beeches prove.
Her voice in sighing breeze and rustling bough
And leaf I seem to hear, and birds, and rills
Murmuring the while they slip through grassy green.
Rarely have silences and lonely thrills
Of overshadowing forests pleased as now,
Except for my own Sun too little seen.
In the same year Petrarch graduated as a patriotic poet by composing his fine Latin metrical epistle on the woes of Italy. In 1335 he received from the Pope a canonry in the cathedral of his patron the Bishop of Lombès. In 1336 he achieved his celebrated ascent of Mount Ventoux, which marks an era as the inauguration of mountain-climbing for pleasure’s sake. In 1336 and 1337 he undertook his first journey to Rome, which he found in a most lamentable condition from rapine and civil war. Attributing this to the absence of the Popes in France, he began his long series of exhortations to them to return, to which, being throughout his lifetime Frenchmen, they naturally turned deaf ears. Hence in a measure the disgust with Avignon which led him to seclude himself more and more in Vaucluse (shut valley), the picturesque retreat on the Sorga whither he betook himself in 1337, a beautiful description of which by Ugo Foscolo may be read in Reeve’s biography. His adoration of Laura had not prevented his contracting less spiritual ties, for two children were born to him about this time.
Petrarch’s rural leisure was largely employed in the composition of a Latin history of Rome, which can have had no critical value, but would have been deeply interesting as exhibiting the classical feeling of the representative of the early Renaissance. He ultimately destroyed it, and turned to the composition of his Latin epic on the Punic war,Africa, for and from which he long expected immortality. His detestation of the Papal Court breaks out about this time in some powerful sonnets. His Italian poems, meanwhile, had made their way with the world to a degree surprising in an age unacquainted with printing. In 1340 he received on the same day the offer of the poetic laurel from the cities of Paris and Rome. Deciding for the latter, he embarked at Marseilles in February 1341, voyaged to Naples, received signal marks of favour from the King, and, repairing to Rome, was invested with the laurel by the Senator of the city, April 8, 1341. From this day the history of modern literature as a recognised power may be said to date. Ere his return at the beginning of 1342, he had finished hisAfrica, and bought a house at Parma to give himself a footing in his native land.
In 1343 Petrarch was again in Italy, discharging an important diplomatic mission with which he had been entrusted by the new Pope Clement VI. to the Court of Naples; the state of which he describes in dark colours, not too dark, as the history of the hapless Queen Joanna, Robert’s successor, sufficiently proves. He nevertheless rendered himself acceptable to her, and, his mission honourably discharged, repaired to Parma, where (1344) he wrote the first of his great political odes,Italia mia benche il parlar sia indarno, and whence he was chased by civil discord. He did not, however, return to Avignon until towards the end of this year. The next few years were chiefly spent in literary occupations, the most remarkable of which was the composition (1347) of his ode to the Tribune Cola di Rienzi, in whom he saw the deliverer of his country. Petrarch’s course was not free from the imputation of ingratitude to his old friends and patrons, the Colonna family; yet it would have been worse to have been silent at the prospect, however brief and delusive, of the resurrection of Rome. Other poets before him had written on Italian politics, but none, not even Dante, had so exalted their theme by eloquence and ennobling largeness of view:
Her ancient-walls, which still with fear and love
The world admires, whene’er it calls to mind
The days of Eld, and turns to look behind;
Her hoar and caverned monuments above
The dust of men whose fame, until the world
In dissolution sink, can never fail;
Her all, that in one ruin now lies hurled,
Hopes to have healed by thee its every ail.
O faithful Brutus! noble Scipios dead!
To you what triumph, where ye now are blest,
If of our worthy choice the fame have spread!
And how his laurelled crest
Will old Fabricius rear, with joy elate
That his own Rome again shall beauteous be and great!
—MACGREGOR.
The next year, 1348, was one of havoc and desolation for Europe, through the ravages of the Black Death, which swept away a larger proportion of her inhabitants than any similar visitation recorded in history. Laura was among the victims, dying on April 6, the anniversary of her meeting with Petrarch. Cardinal Colonna, his chief patron since the death of the Bishop of Lombès, was also carried off on July 3. Nothing can be added to his own words: