Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, page 199 by Various Authors
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rn their buttonholes, and stripped the consecrated laurel of its leaves to make garlands for their own dull heads, and poured forth international compliments, and glorified one another, and hugged themselves for delight at their fine comprehension of the poet, and fell on their knees before him, and immolated their individual hearts and souls at the shrine of his genius; and, lo! there was not a true appreciater of Petrarch among them all! The right appraiser of Petrarch has been there before and since, but he was not there then. The noise and the bustle and the wisdom of the multitude held him aloof, and he waited until a more convenient season. He comes by preference in the spring-time, knowing that then Nature and Petrarch sing in unison. He is a poet, because it takes a poet to understand a poet, no less than a hero a hero. He is of such simple, foolish mould that when he thinks there is no one near to spy him out he casts himself down upon the sod and kisses it with all tenderness, and caresses the daisies with his finger-tips, greeting them as his younger brethren; for there is something stirring in him which draws him nearer to earth's heart than other men, and he loves to dwell upon his common origin with flower and leaf. He does not fall down and worship Petrarch, because he knows that Petrarch is only one expression of the great power that lives behind all thought and speech--one part of the great whole that lies spread out before him on the river and the cliff. But he takes the old poet by the hand and looks straight into his eyes, and reads there what is written in his own heart, and says, "We twain are brethren and friends, sovereign and equal, for evermore."
If Petrarch had lived earlier in the centuries of Christianity, he would have been a monk. His genius would have found expression in the cloister-life, for the first monks were poets and philosophers. But he lived at a period when that beautiful principle of asceticism was no longer at one with genius. The fine essence of spiritu