Page:In Maremma, by Ouida (vol 1).djvu/173

 bours sometimes would say to her; and she would answer: 'Can you call yesterday's wind back, or the clouds of last night, can you gather them together this morning? I can only sing what comes to me.'

Under other influences it would have become genius, this facile power of stirring the brains and hearts of others with sound; but here it remained only a gift of verse as many had, though fresher and more eloquent than most. There was no food for if, except a strophe of the 'Gerusalemme Liberata,' a story from the 'Furioso,' or the 'Morgante Maggiore,' passed from mouth to mouth of the people.

Once she found in a drawer a torn and yellow transcript of the sonnets of Petrarca, copied in a crabbed hand by some poor scholar of the past century; it was the dearest treasure that she had; it was her only book. She read with trouble and slowly at the best of times; but by degrees she learned these sonnets all by heart through dint of going over them so often, and the stained rough yellow leaves were sacred to her as the Holy Grail to a knight. She knew nothing as to who Petrarca had been, nothing of Vaucluse, or of the entry into Rome; but