il of palest blue, that
seems woven out of the very souls of happy days,--a bridal veil, with
which the sunshine weds this soft landscape in summer. Such and so
indescribable is the atmospheric film that hangs over these poems of
Petrarch's; there is a delicate haze about the words, that vanishes when
you touch them, and reappears as you recede. How it clings, for
instance, around this sonnet!

SONNET 191.

"_Aura che quelle chiome._"

Sweet air, that circlest round those radiant tresses,
And floatest mingled with them, fold on fold,
Deliciously, and scatterest that fine gold,
Then twinest it again, my heart's dear jesses,
Thou lingerest on those eyes, whose beauty presses
Stings in my heart that all its life exhaust,
Till I go wandering round my treasure lost,
Like some scared creature whom the night distresses.
I seem to find her now, and now perceive
How far away she is; now rise, now fall;
Now what I wish, now what is true, believe.
O happy air! since joys enrich thee all,
Rest thee; and thou, O stream too bright to grieve!
Why can I not float with thee at thy call?

The airiest and most fugitive among Petrarch's love-poems, so far as I
know,--showing least of that desperate earnestness which he has somehow
imparted to almost all,--is this little ode or madrigal. It is
interesting to see, from this, that he could be almost conventional and
courtly in moments when he held Laura farthest aloof; and when it is
compared with the depths of solemn emotion in his later sonnets, it
seems like the soft glistening of young birch-leaves against a
background of pines.

CANZONE XXIII.

"_Nova angeletta sovra l'ale accorta._"

A new-born angel, with her wings extended,
Came floating from the skies to this fair shore,
Where, fate-controlled, I wandered with my sorrows.
She saw me there, alone and unbefriended.
She wove a silken net, and threw it o'er
The turf, whose greenness all the pathway borrows.
Then was I captured; nor could fears arise,
Such sweet seduction glimmered from her eyes.

The following, on the other hand, seems to me one of the Shakespearian
sonnets; the successive phrases set sail, one by one, like a yacht
squadron; each spreads its graceful wings and glides away. It is hard to
handle this white canvas without soiling. Macgregor, in the only version
of this sonnet which I have seen, abandons all at