This
is all I ask, but this I cannot obtain. Doomed always to wander, and to
be a stranger everywhere, O Fortune, Fortune, fix me at last to some one
spot! I do not covet thy favors. Let me enjoy a tranquil poverty, let me
pass in this retreat the few days that remain to me!" The pathetic stop
of Petrarch's poetical organ was one he could pull out at pleasure,--and
indeed we soon learn to distrust literary tears, as the cheap subterfuge
for want of real feeling with natures of this quality. Solitude with him
was but the pseudonyme of notoriety. Poverty was the archdeaconry of
Parma, with other ecclesiastical pickings. During his retreat at
Vaucluse, in the very height of that divine sonneteering love of Laura,
of that sensitive purity which called Avignon Babylon, and rebuked the
sinfulness of Clement, he was himself begetting that kind of children
which we spell with a _b_. We believe that, if Messer Francesco had been
present when the woman was taken in adultery, he would have flung the
first stone without the slightest feeling of inconsistency, nay, with a
sublime sense of virtue. The truth is, that it made very little
difference to him what sort of proper sentiment he expressed, provided he
could do it elegantly and with unction.
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