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ARNE NOVÁK
PETRARCH: But my utterance will be again only haughty grief. I stood isolated and deserted in the world. I had naught save my grief and my bitterness. My mistress, who meanwhile had changed my loftiest yearning into a wavering dream, died. My tranquility became loathsome to me. Mild and placid France suddenly appeared inhospitable to me. All the waters to which I bowed down were only mirrors of my distress, and not a day passed but I cursed them. All the winds, to which I entrusted my sorrow, dragged my thoughts into the cold eddy of despair somewhere near the feet of the frosty lord of hell, and there were moments when I feared that he, the mighty destroyer, bore my own countenance, sorrowful and set in hopeless fixity. I ascended mountains and there only my shadow, also a thing accursed, also an adulterer of despair, leered upon me.
CHARLES IV.: Why, you are not a priest, not a Christian?
PETRARCH: Sire, there are moments when I have a foreboding that our humanity is something of wider compass than Christendom, that the sacred grace does not vouchsafe us recovery from all spiritual wounds, that Christ has not redeemed us utterly from inherited sin—
CHARLES IV.: What stones of offence, poet, have you brought from Virgil's hell, that you
