Page:Petrach, the first modern scholar and man of letters.djvu/319

 HE Italians were probably the first among modern peoples to discover the outer world to be something beautiful in itself.

"Would that you could know," Petrarch writes to a friend, " with what delight I wander, free and alone, among the mountains, forests, and streams." He spent many years, as we have seen, in his simple rustic home at Vaucluse, and throughout his life he was in the habit of retiring now and then to the seclusion of the country. In no way did his tastes more nearly approach our modern predilections than in his love of nature and his passion for travel.

He was once invited to accompany a friend upon a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but he discreetly refused the invitation; not that he feared the perils of the deep, but he could not overcome his horror of sea-sickness, which he had several times experienced upon the Mediterranean. Instead of joining his friend, he prepared a little guide-book for him, which might serve to call his attention to the noteworthy objects 297