While all this tumult was raging round the house, and within the heart of Giacomo, the student's lamp was burning, how calm, how still, in the remote and secluded chamber of his friend Petrarch! To him, out of a kind and considerate regard, and from no distrust in his zeal or attachment, the ardent lover had concealed his perilous enterprise. Remote from the whole scene, and remote from all the passions of it, sat the youthful sage; not remote, however, from deep excitements of his own. Far from it. Reflection has her emotions thrilling as those of passion. He who has not closed his door upon the world, and sat down with books and his own thoughts in a solitude like this—may have lived, we care not in how gay a world, or how passionate an existence,—he has yet an excitement to experience, which, if not so violent, is far more prolonged, deeper, and more sustained than any he has known,—than any which the most brilliant scenes, or the most clamorous triumphs of life, can furnish. What is all the sparkling exhilaration of society, the wittiest and the fairest,—what all the throbbings and perturbations of love itself, compared with the intense feeling of the youthful thinker, who has man, and God, and eternity for his fresh contemplations,—who, for the first time, perceives in his solitude all the grand enigmas of human existence lying unsolved about him? His brow is not corrugated, his eye is not inflamed: he sits calm and serene—a child would look into his face and be drawn near to him—but it seems to him that on his beating heart the very hand of God is lying.
The poet had closed his door, and unrolled before his solitary lamp his favourite manuscript, "The Tusculan Disputations of Cicero." How well that solitary lamp burning on so vivid and so noiseless—the only thing there in motion, but whose very motion makes the stillness more evident, the calm more felt; how well that lamp—the very soul, as it seems, of the little chamber it illumines—harmonises with the student's mood! How it makes bright the solitude around him! How it brings sense of companionship and of life where nothing but it—and thought—are stirring!
But though the young student had seated himself to his intellectual feast, it was evident that he was not quite at his ease; there was something which occasioned him a slight disquietude. In truth he was destined, by his father, to be "learned in the law;" was enjoying a stolen fruit; and whatever the well-known proverb may say, we have never found, ourselves, that any enjoyment is heightened by a sense of insecurity in its possession, or a thought of the possible penalty which may be the consequence of its indulgence. Petrarch might have been observed to listen attentively to every footstep on the great staircase that served the whole wing of the building to which his little turret belonged; and till the step was lost, or he was sure that it had stopped at some lower stage in the house, he suspended the perusal of his manuscript, and sat prepared to drop the precious treasure into a chest that stood open at his feet, and to replace it by an enormous volume of jurisprudence which lay ready at hand for this piece of hypocritical service. This peculiarly nervous condition was the result of a paternal visit which had been paid him, most unexpectedly, a few evenings before. His father, suspecting that he was more devoted to the classics than to the study of the law, started suddenly from Avignon, stole upon his son unforewarned, ruthlessly snatched from him the prized manuscripts in which he found him absorbed, and committed them to the flames. Petrarch, of gentle temper, and full of filial respect, ventured upon no resistance; but when he saw his Virgil and his Cicero put upon his funeral pyre, he burst into a flood of uncontrollable tears. His father, who was not himself without a love of classic literature, but who was anxious for his son's advancement in the world, and his study of a profession on which that advancement appeared entirely to depend, was smit with compassion and some remorse. These last two manuscripts he rescued himself from the flames, and restored to his disconsolate son, with the repeated admonition, however, to indulge less in their perusal, nor to allow them to take the place due to the science of jurisprudence.
"Science!" said the young enthusiast, who had recovered something of his self-possession: "Can conclusions wrested often with perverted ingenuity from artificial principles and arbitrary axioms, be honoured with the name of science? And the law, to obtain this fictitious resemblance to a science, leaves justice behind and unthought of. I will study it, my father, as I would practise any mechanical art, if you should prescribe it as a means of being serviceable to my family; but you—who are a scholar—ah! place not a tissue of technicalities, however skilfully interwoven, on a level with truth, which has its basis in the nature of things. I would help my fellow-men to justice; but must I spend my life, and dry up and impoverish my very soul, in regulating his disputes according to rules that are something very different from justice?—often mere logical deductions from certain legal abstractions, in which all moral right and wrong,—all substantial justice between man and man, is utterly forgotten?"
"My son," said the father, "you are young, and therefore rash. You think it, perhaps, an easy thing to do justice between man and man. We cannot do justice between man and man. No combination of honesty and intelligence can effect it; the whole compass of society affords no means for its accomplishment. To administer moral justice, each case must be decided on its own peculiar merits, and those merits are to be found in the motives of the human heart. We cannot promise men justice. But we must terminate their disputes. Therefore it is we have a system of law—our only substitute for justice—by which men are contented to be governed because it is a system, and applicable to all alike. Believe me, that wise and able men of all countries are well occupied in rendering more symmetrical, more imposing, and as little immoral and unjust as possible, their several systems of jurisprudence."
Petrarch was silent; it was neither his wish nor his policy to prolong the discussion. Besides, his heart was too full. Had he dared, he would have pleaded for his own liberty; for choice of poverty and intellectual freedom—for poverty and greatness! But what he felt within him of the promptings of ambition, the assurance of fame, the consciousness of genius, he had too much modesty to express. He could not do justice to himself, without appearance of overweening pride. It was better to be silent than to say but half.
It was the remembrance of this visit which, on the present occasion, made him listen with a painful curiosity to every step upon the stairs. And now a step was heard. It came nearer and nearer, higher and higher—a rapid step which never paused an instant till it reached his own door. A loud knocking followed. But this time it was no spy upon his literary hours. On opening the door, a fellow-student, breathless with haste, rushed into the room, and related the tragical event which had taken place at the house of their common friend Giacomo.
Petrarch immediately descended and ran to meet his friend. He found him already a prisoner! The Podestà, willing, however, to treat the unhappy student with as much lenity as possible, had converted his own apartments into his prison. He well knew, also, the honourable character of his prisoner; the granting this indulgence enabled him to exact his word of honour not to escape, and he probably judged, considering the extreme popularity of Giacomo in the university, that this was a greater security for his safe custody than any walls, or any guard, which he had at his command in Bologna.
Petrarch was horror-struck when he came fully to apprehend the extreme peril to which his friend had exposed himself. Whatever were his motives, he had committed, in fact, a capital offence, and one to be classed amongst the most heinous; it was the crime of abduction he had perpetrated, and for which he stood exposed to the penalty of death. The poet fell weeping into the arms of his friend.
"Alas!" said Giacomo, "she would not hear me!" The inflexibility of Constantia was still the only grief that dwelt upon his mind. "She stood there—on that spot—I could kiss the traces of her footstep could I see them—cold, cold as the statue—I might have prayed with better hope to the sculptured marble!"