all their charm if they could be deemed imaginary. Take this for example:
"As Love pursued me in the wonted glade,
Wary as he, who weening foe to find,
Guards every pass, and looks before, behind,
I stood in mail of ancient thought arrayed:
When, sideways turned, I saw by sudden shade
The sun impeded, and, on earth outlined
Her shape, who, if aright conceives my mind,
Meetest for immortality was made,
I said unto my heart, 'Why dost thou fear?'
But ere my heart could open to my thought,
The beams whereby I melt shone all around;
And, as when flash by thunder-peal is caught,
My eyes encounter of those eyes most dear
And smiling welcome simultaneous found."
How natural and pleasing if the incident be real! and how marvellous the poetical power which can raise such an edifice out of such a trifle! On the other hand, how insipid if the little event, instead of a ripple on the surface of life arrested by the poet's art ere it has had time to pass into nothingness, be but a fiction to enable him to say a pretty thing! The author of so frigid a contrivance could never have been the author of the Canzoniere.
But though Laura's actual existence is certain, her identity is a subject of everlasting controversy. The popular belief near to Petrarch's own day is expressed by an anonymous biographer, who, writing, as is thought, near the end of the fourteenth century, calls her Loretta, and, by adding that the Pope offered Petrarch a dispensation from his ecclesiastical vows in order to marry her, clearly indicates that she was believed to be a single woman. The Abbé de Sade, however, in his life of
