PETRARCH THE MAN 



the clear sky, or issues living from the heart of rock. 

 My feet are rooted to the ground with fear/' 



Now, it seems to me hard to overestimate the im- 

 portance of this poetical epistle (which has its pendant 

 in the ItaHan poem, Di pensier in pensier, di monte in 

 monte) as a document throwing light upon Petrarch's 

 character, and especially upon his relations to Laura. 

 Writers of love poetry before him, from antiquity down 

 to Rustico di Filippo, from the latter down to the school 

 of the dolce stil nuovo, have shed tears in plenty, have 

 lamented bitterly the cruelty of their lady, whom they 

 have represented as an enemy; but there is something 

 more than this in Petrarch's poem. Although it is 

 fairly long and frequently rhetorical enough, although 

 Petrarch in writing it is treating the matter objectively, 

 I am almost certain that he actually suffered as he 

 describes, and that, if he did so, he was the victim of a 

 nervous malady the true nature of which may have 

 been unknown to him. Those nocturnal terrors, and the 

 form they take, are well enough known nowadays to be 

 almost commonplaces. Petrarch, because of his highly 

 strung temperament and the clash between his religious 

 and his worldly aspirations, and because of overwork, 

 was just the person to suffer from nervous troubles of 

 this character. 



One phase of the ailment he recognized and under- 

 stood. St. Augustine says to him in the Secretum: 

 " You are suffering from a terrible scourge of the soul, 

 melancholy, which modern men call accidie, the 



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