ADVENT OF SPRING IN THE SOUTH
147
CHARLES IV. (with irony): And your tribune, your Achilles, your Roman?
PETRARCH: Has only arisen to gain Your Majesty for our endeavours.
CHARLES IV.: Adventurers will scarcely succeed in winning me over, poets the rather.
PETRARCH (agitatedly): Sire, be ours, be in good sooth the Roman Emperor! Let the ancestral blood in your veins strike up its song, let your dreams of Avignon be transformed into action. Your admirer, your servant, your slave mourns at your feet . . . mourns, not on his own behalf, but for the sake of thousands in obscurity, and hundreds of thousands yet unborn. Be as the spring-time, as the South, as life! If, among Your Majesty's precious metal there is any slag which burdens you, the heat of a new youth will smelt it out, and the gleaming and sunlit gold of your unscathed empery will redden in the glorious radiance: Night is now bere, and you do not see my mournful countenance—would that you did! Longing and hope, tenderness and humility appeal to you from it. To you it seems that it is autumn, and that the world has grown old. But that is a delusion; spring-time is drawing near, and it is for you—you in very sooth—to open its blossoming portal, that the budding of a new youth may surge along like a wild mountain torrent.
