ew mistress when the
old one fails him, feels dreadfully alone, the world dreadfully dreary
around him; he sits down and cries, and his crying is genuine, making
the tears come also into our eyes. And Laura, as she becomes a more
distant ideal, becomes nobler, though noble with only a faint earthly
graciousness not comparable to the glory of the living Beatrice. And,
as he goes on, growing older and weaker and more desolate, the thought
of a glorified Laura (as all are glorified, even in the eyes of the
weakest, by death) begins to haunt him as Dante was haunted by the
thought of Beatrice alive. Yet, even at this very time, come doubts of
the lawfulness of having thus adored (or thought he had adored) a mortal
woman; he does not know whether all this may not have been vanity and
folly; he tries to turn his thoughts away from Laura and up to God.
Perhaps he may be called on to account for having given too much of his
life to a mere earthly love. Then, again, Laura reappears beautified in
his memory, and is again tremblingly half-conjured away. He is weak, and
sad, and helpless, and alone; and his heart is empty; he knows not what
to think nor how to feel; he sobs, and we cry with him. Nowhere could
there be found a stranger contrast than this nostalgic craving after the
dead Laura, vacillating and troubled by fear of sin and doubt of
unworthiness of object, with that solemn ending of the "Vita Nuova,"
where the name of Beatrice is pronounced for the last time before it be
glorified in Paradise, where Dante devotes his life to becoming worthy
of saying "such words as have never been said of any lady." The ideal
woman is one and unchangeable in glory, and unchangeable is the passion
of her lover; but of this sweet dead Laura, whose purity and beauty and
cruelty he had sung, without a tremor of self-unworthiness all her
life, of her the poor weak Petrarch begins to doubt, of her and her
worthiness of all this love; and when? when she is dead and himself is
dying.

Such a man is Petrarch; and yet, by the irresistible purifying and
elevating power of the "Vita Nuova,'" this man came to write not other
_albas_ and _serenas,_ not other love-songs to be added to the
love-songs of Provence, but those sonnets and canzoni which for four
centuries taught the world, too coarse as yet to receive Dante's passion
at first hand, a nobler and more spiritual love. After Petrarch a
gradual change takes place in the poetic conception of love