an ostermoor built for
two.

Petrarch is one of the four great Italian poets, and his life is vital
to us because all our modern literature traces a pedigree to him.

The Italian Renaissance is the dawn of civilization: the human soul
emerging into wakefulness after its sleep of a thousand years.

The Dark Ages were dark because religion was supreme, and to keep it
pure they had to subdue every one who doubted it or hoped to improve
upon it. So wrangle, dispute, faction, feud, plot, exile, murder and
Sherlock Holmes absorbed the energies of men and paralyzed spontaneity
and all happy, useful effort. The priest caught us coming and going. We
had to be christened when we were born and given extreme unction when we
died, otherwise we could not die legally--hell was to pay, here and
hereafter.

The only thing that finally banished fear and stopped the rage for
vengeance, revenge and loot was Love. Not the love for God. No! Just the
love of man and woman.

Passionate, romantic love! When the man had evolved to a point where he
loved one woman with an absorbing love, the rosy light of dawn appeared
in the East, the Dark Ages sank into oblivion, and Civilization kicked
off the covers and cooed in the cradle.

Is it bad to love one woman with all the intensity that was formerly
lavished on ten? Some people think so; some have always thought so--in
the Dark Ages everybody thought so. Religion taught it: God was jealous.
Marriage was an expediency. Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare live only
because they loved.

Literature, music, sculpture, painting, constitute art--not, however,
all of art. And art is a secondary sexual manifestation. Beauty is the
child of married minds, and Emerson says, "Beauty is the seal of
approval that Nature sets upon Virtue."

So, if you please, love and virtue are one, and a lapse from virtue is a
lapse from love. It is love that vitalizes the intellect to the creative
point. So it will be found that men with the creative faculty have
always been lovers. To give a list of the great artists that the world
has seen would be to name a list of lovers.

The Italian Renaissance was the birth of Romantic Love. It was a new
thing, and we have not gotten used to it yet. It is so new to men's
natures that they do not always know how to manage it, and so it
occasionally runs away with them and leaves them struggling in the
ditch, from which they emerge sorry sights, or laughable, according to
the view