Page:A History of Italian Literature - Garnett (1898).djvu/97

Rh Perhaps, some future hour,  To her accustomed bower  Might come the untamed, and yet the gentle she;  And where she saw me first,  Might turn with eyes athirst And kinder joy to look again for me; Then, oh, the charity! Seeing amid the stones  The earth that held my bones, A sigh for very love at last  Might ask of Heaven to pardon me the past; And Heaven itself could not say nay, As with her gentle veil she wiped the tears away."

Not much need be said of Petrarch's character, whether as poet, scholar, or man. As a poet he deserves to be numbered among the few who have attained absolute perfection within a certain sphere; to whom within these limits nothing can be added, though much may be taken away. The subtraction of the trivial or fantastic from Petrarch's verse leaves, nevertheless, a mass of love-poetry transcending in amount no less than in loveliness all poetry of the same class from the pen of any other man. If immortality is deservedly awarded to a single masterpiece like the Burial of Sir John Moore or the Pervigilium Veneris, it should not be difficult to estimate his claims whose similar masterpieces are counted by scores. Perhaps the greatest of his beauties is the complete naturalness of his ceaseless succession of thoughts transcendently exquisite. If Petrarch has not the thrilling note or transparent spirituality of Dante, his perfect form represents a higher stage of artistic development—too high, indeed, to be maintained by his successors. A just parallel might be drawn between the three great sonnet-writers of the Latin peoples, Dante, Petrarch,