day such a live sparkle on the water, such a luminous freshness on
the grass, that it seems, as is so often the case in early June, as if
all history were a dream, and the whole earth were but the creation of a
summer's day.

If Petrarch still knows and feels the consummate beauty of these earthly
things, it may seem to him some repayment for the sorrows of a lifetime
that one reader, after all this lapse of years, should choose his
sonnets to match this grass, these blossoms, and the soft lapse of these
blue waves. Yet any longer or more continuous poem would be out of place
to-day. I fancy that this narrow cove prescribes the proper limits of a
sonnet; and when I count the lines of ripple within yonder projecting
wall, there proves to be room for just fourteen. Nature meets our whims
with such little fitnesses. The words which build these delicate
structures are as soft and fine and close-textured as the sands upon
this tiny beach, and their monotone, if such it be, is the monotone of
the neighboring ocean. Is it not possible, by bringing such a book into
the open air, to separate it from the grimness of commentators, and
bring it back to life and light and Italy? The beautiful earth is the
same as when this poetry and passion were new; there is the same
sunlight, the same blue water and green grass; yonder pleasure-boat
might bear, for aught we know, the friends and lovers of five centuries
ago; Petrarch and Laura might be there, with Boccaccio and Fiammetta as
comrades, and with Chaucer as their stranger guest. It bears, at any
rate, if I know its voyagers, eyes as lustrous, voices as sweet. With
the world thus young, beauty eternal, fancy free, why should these
delicious Italian pages exist but to be tortured into grammatical
examples? Is there no reward to be imagined for a delightful book that
can match Browning's fantastic burial of a tedious one? When it has
sufficiently basked in sunshine, and been cooled in pure salt air, when
it has bathed in heaped clover, and been scented, page by page, with
melilot, cannot its beauty once more blossom, and its buried loves
revive?

Emboldened by such influences, at least let me translate a sonnet, and
see if anything is left after the sweet Italian syllables are gone.
Before this continent was discovered, before English literature existed,
when Chaucer was a child, these words were written. Yet they are to-day
as fresh and perfect as these laburnum-blossoms that droop ab