fever after the only woman, I take it upon me to declare"
"Psha! psha! Tell me, if you would have me listen, what further can I do? I have wooed her in sonnets, which ought to have affected her, for Petrarch polished the verse. Nothing touches her. She is as obdurate as steel. Not a smile—not, at least, for me—and for all others she smiles how sweetly, how intelligently, how divinely! But by the Holy Cross! she shall love me! Petrarch, she shall!—she shall!"
"My dear Giacomo, you rave. Be a little reasonable. Lover as you are, stay on this side of madness. Love on—if it must be so—love her for ever; but do not for ever be striving for a return of your passion. Take home your unrequited love into your bosom—nourish it there—but do not exasperate it by a bootless and incessant struggle against fate. For my part, I can conceive there may be a strange street luxury in this solitary love that lives in one breast alone. It is all your own. It is fed, kindled, diversified, sustained by your own imagination. It is passion without the gross thraldom of circumstance. It is the pure relation of soul to soul, without the vast, intricate, unmanageable relationship of life to life."
"To you, a poet," replied Giacomo with a slight tone of, sarcasm, "such a passion may be possible. Perhaps you care not for more heat than serves to animate and make fluent the verse. Pleased with the glow of fancy and of feeling, you can stop short of possession. I cannot! Oh, you poets! you fuse your passion with your genius: you describe, you do not feel."
"Not feel!" exclaimed Petrarch "we cannot then describe."
"Oh, yes! you can describe. You fling the golden light of imagination, like a light from heaven, round the object of your adoration; but, in return, the real woman is translated herself to the skyey region of imagination. She becomes a creature of your thoughts. You are conscious that the glory you have flung around her, you can re-assume. Petrarch, Petrarch! if you ever love, if you are constant to any woman from Springtime to the last leaf of Autumn, it will be to some fair creature who dwells for ever, and only, in your imagination, whom you will never press to your bosom. You poets love beauty, you love passion, you love all things fair and great, and you make a vision of them all. You sing them, and there's an end."
"Well, well," said the poet, warding off the attack with a smile, "I have brought down, it seems, a severe castigation on myself."
"Dear, dear Petrarch! let it teach you never again to give advice to a lover, unless it be to show him how, or where, he is to meet his mistress. Fool that I am! she is, perhaps, all this time in the Church of St Giovanni." And without another word he darted up a street that led to that same church, leaving his friend to follow or not, as he pleased.
CHAPTER II.
There was, indeed, something like perversity, it must be allowed, in this firm refusal of Constantia to reward so devoted an attachment. Even her stern, grave uncle, whose judicial functions were not likely to give him much leisure or disposition to interfere with the love affairs of his niece, had dropt a hint that the suit of Giacomo da Valencia would not be displeasing to himself. Bologna could not have supplied a more fitting match: our lover, therefore, was not guilty of presumption, though of much obstinacy. It was his right, this blessed hand of Constantia—he felt it was his right, and he would win it.
Some one, some day, she must surely love, he argued to himself, and why not me? and why not now? Oh, could I but plead my passion, he would say, alone, pour it out unrestrained at her feet, she would surely see how reasonable it was that she should love, that she ought, that she must! To his excited and impetuous mood of mind, it appeared that nothing but the artificial barrier which the customs of society interposed in their
