sness, indifference; and, joined with the genitive [Greek:
nooio]--that is, of the mind--it meant, according to the scholiasts,
as much as [Greek: lype] (Betruebnis)--that is, distress or grief. In
the Middle Ages it became 'dislike of intellect so far as that is a
divine gift'--that disease of the cloister which a monkish chronicler
defined as 'a sadness or loathing and an immoderate distress of mind,
caused by mental confusion, through which happiness of mind was
destroyed, and the mind thrown back upon itself as from an abyss of
despair.'

To Dante it meant the state--

Sad
In the sweet air, made gladsome by the sun,

distaste for the good and beautiful.

The modern meaning which it took with Petrarch is well defined by
Geiger as being neither ecclesiastic nor secular sin,[5] but

Entirely human and peculiar to the cleverest--the battle between
reality and seeming, the attempt to people the arid wastes of the
commonplace with philosophic thought--the unhappiness and despair
that arise from comparing the unconcern of the majority with
one's own painful unrest, from the knowledge that the results of
striving do not express the effort made--that human life is but a
ceaseless and unworthy rotation, in which the bad are always to
the fore, and the good fall behind ... as pessimism, melancholy,
world pain (Weltschmerz)--that tormenting feeling which mocks all
attempt at definition, and is too vitally connected with erring
and striving human nature to be curable--that longing at once for
human fellowship and solitude, for active work and a life of
contemplation.

Petrarch knew too the pleasure of sadness, what Goethe called 'Wonne
der Wehmuth,' the _dolendi voluptas._

Lo, what new pleasure human wits devise!
For oftentimes one loves
Whatever new thing moves
The sighs, that will in closest order go;
And I'm of those whom sorrowing behoves;
And that with some success
I labour, you may guess,
When eyes with tears, and heart is brimmed with woe.

In Sonnet 190:

My chiefest pleasure now is making moan.

Oh world, oh fruitless thought,
Oh luck, my luck, who'st led me thus for spite!...
For loving well, with pain I'm rent....
Nor can I yet repent,
My heart o'erflowed with deadly pleasantness.
Now wait I from no less
A foe than dealt me my first blow, my last.
And were I slain full fas