CIVILIZATION AND SCIENCE. 271 



of the Alps calls to his mind Hannibal, and beyond he descries, with 

 the mind's (rather than the bodily) eye, the land for which he longed 

 Italy. But now he feels the fetters which bind him growing painfully 

 tighter ; the image of his mysterious lady below there in Avignon, and 

 whom he had for the first time seen almost exactly nine years before, 

 April 6, 1327, rises before his mind. Of the Ovidian verse which he 

 uses to describe the state of his feelings 



" Odero si potero. Si non, invitus amabo " l 



we can hardly say that it expresses a great amount of passion. The 

 grandeur of the surrounding spectacle, the Rhone at his feet, in the dis- 

 tance the flashing mirror of the Mediterranean between Marseilles and 

 Aigues Mortes, bring him back again to the real world. While he aban- 

 dons himself to these impressions, it occurs to him to open, as though 

 it had been a "book of fate," a little copy of St. Augustine's " Confes- 

 sions" which he always carried about with him. He read there this 

 passage : " Men go to gaze on lofty mountains and the mighty waves 

 of the sea, and the wide currents of rivers, and the vast extent of ocean, 

 and the circling courses of the stars, and they overlook themselves." 

 Taken in connection with the context, the passage does not carry an 

 ascetic meaning, but occurs in the course of a theoretical explanation 

 of memory that rather does credit to the mystic Bishop of Hippo. But 

 Petrarca sees in these words, so directly applicable to his surroundings 

 at that moment, the very finger of God. Full of shame and remorse, 

 and without uttering another word, he descends from the mountain, 

 and that very night addresses to his confessor, Dionigi de' Roberti, the 

 doleful letter from which we take this narrative. The poor fellow had 

 for a moment, forgetful of his soul's welfare, indulged the harmless 

 pleasure of looking out on the entrancing world of sense, when he should 

 have been moodily contemplating his own inner state. So diseased 

 were the intellectual faculties of man in Europe in that age, that this 

 incident sufficed to bring a conscientious, fine-feeling, but not very 

 strong-minded man like Petrarca into a state of intensely painful self- 

 conflict. 



Fortunately, the " Decamerone " shows that not all minds were so 

 delicately strung. But in the " Divina Commedia " we curiously 

 enough see a poetic imagination of the highest power, equipped with 

 all the scientific lore of its day, clothing the ascetic view of the world 

 in such a garb of stern reality, that King John of Saxony has been able, 

 from the description given in the " Inferno," to sketch a topographical 

 plan of hell, as though Virgil had conducted, not a poet, but a scientific 



1 " Amores," lib. iii., Eleg. x., v. 35. " If I can, I will hate ; if not, I shall love against 

 my will." 



8 This incident occurred in the thirty-second year of the poet's life. The passage from 

 Augustine is as follows in the original : " Et eunt homines admirari alta montium, et in- 

 gentes fluctus maris, et latissimos lapsus fluminum, et oceaui ambitum, et gyros siderum, 

 et relinquunt seipsos." 



