ms to him that on his beating heart the very hand of God is
lying.

The poet had closed his door, and unrolled before his solitary lamp his
favourite manuscript, "The Tusculan Disputations of Cicero." How well that
solitary lamp burning on so vivid and so noiseless--the only thing there
in motion, but whose very motion makes the stillness more evident, the
calm more felt; how well that lamp--the very soul, as it seems, of the
little chamber it illumines--harmonises with the student's mood! How it
makes bright the solitude around him! How it brings sense of companionship
and of life where nothing but it--and thought--are stirring!

But though the young student had seated himself to his intellectual feast,
it was evident that he was not quite at his ease; there was something
which occasioned him a slight disquietude. In truth he was destined, by
his father, to be "learned in the law;" was enjoying a stolen fruit; and
whatever the well-known proverb may say, we have never found, ourselves,
that any enjoyment is heightened by a sense of insecurity in its
possession, or a thought of the possible penalty which may be the
consequence of its indulgence. Petrarch might have been observed to listen
attentively to every footstep on the great staircase that served the whole
wing of the building to which his little turret belonged; and till the
step was lost, or he was sure that it had stopped at some lower stage in
the house, he suspended the perusal of his manuscript, and sat prepared to
drop the precious treasure into a chest that stood open at his feet, and
to replace it by an enormous volume of jurisprudence which lay ready at
hand for this piece of hypocritical service. This peculiarly nervous
condition was the result of a paternal visit which had been paid him, most
unexpectedly, a few evenings before. His father, suspecting that he was
more devoted to the classics than to the study of the law, started
suddenly from Avignon, stole upon his son unforewarned, ruthlessly
snatched from him the prized manuscripts in which he found him absorbed,
and committed them to the flames. Petrarch, of gentle temper, and full of
filial respect, ventured upon no resistance; but when he saw his Virgil
and his Cicero put upon his funeral pyre, he burst into a flood of
uncontrollable tears. His father, who was not himself without a love of
classic literature, but who was anxious for his son's advancement in the
world, and his study of a professio