If Petrarch had lived earlier in the centuries of Christianity, he would have been a monk. His genius would have found expression in the cloister-life, for the first monks were poets and philosophers. But he lived at a period when that beautiful principle of asceticism was no longer at one with genius. The fine essence of spirituality was gone from it, and it had hardened into senseless form and matter; and the law of his own mind forbade his pledging himself irrevocably to what in one mood seemed highest and most precious, but what another mood might contradict and openly defy. He knew that, although that ascetic temper which took possession of his soul at times when his genius was loudest, most clamorous, most importunate, was the basis of all monastic principle, he might not imprison it, fleeting, evanescent, within the dungeons of vows and formalism. And to-day, no less than in Petrarch's time, the same spirit walks the earth, shines through the actions and speech of all high souls, and yet refuses to bind itself to dull external shows and symbols.
If Petrarch had not withdrawn himself to the solitude of the Vaucluse, I doubt if we should know more of his passion for Laura to-day than could be told in a score of sonnets. For with his mind overloaded by the sights and sounds and honors that were heaped upon him, he never could have separated her from the contingent circumstances that surrounded their intercourse in Avignon. But there, on the banks of the Sorgue, he viewed her image from afar, dismissed all the attendant episodes of palace and revel, court and council, and beheld only the ideal--or rather the real--Laura in her own worth and significance. Surely, never was there verse through which showed so plainly the Nature under whose auspices it was brought forth as those songs of Petrarch. I seem to feel that they were written in solitude, not sublime, but pleasing, and in a narrow valley shut out from contemplation of aught else. And I know, as I leave the Vaucluse behind me, how deep a hold the memory of the loved fountain must needs have taken upon the poet's mind, for I too have made me a picture of a river, and a grotto, and a shadowy pool, and a low brown house, and a stately laurel tree, which will always live in my sense. And these things resolve themselves into one with a few scattered sonnets, and a shadowy gold-haired form, and a handful of sweet small roses, and, lo! I have made incarnate and have bound fast to me for ever that beautiful old-time idyl of the Vaucluse.