ws a distant prospect far away
Of busy cities, now in vain display'd,
For they can lure no further; and the ray
Of a bright sun can make sufficient holiday,

Developing the mountains, leaves, and flowers,
And shining in the brawling brook, where-by,
Clear as a current, glide the sauntering hours
With a calm languor, which, though to the eye
Idlesse it seem, hath its morality.
If from society we learn to live,
'Tis solitude should teach us how to die;
It hath no flatterers, vanity can give
No hollow aid; alone--man with his God must strive;

Or, it may be, with demons, who impair
The strength of better thoughts, and seek their prey
In melancholy bosoms, such as were
Of moody texture from their earliest day,
And loved to dwell in darkness and dismay,
Deeming themselves predestin'd to a doom
Which is not of the pangs that pass away;
Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb,
The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom.[1]

[1] Childe Harold, Canto iv.

The noble bard, not content with perpetuating Arqua in these
soul-breathing stanzas, has appended to them the following note:--

Petrarch retired to Arqua immediately on his return from the
unsuccessful attempt to visit Urban V. at Rome, in the year
1370, and, with the exception of his celebrated visit to
Venice in company with Francesco Novello da Carrara, he
appears to have passed the four last years of his life between
that charming solitude and Padua. For four months previous to
his death he was in a state of continual languor, and in the
morning of July the 19th, in the year 1374, was found dead in
his library chair with his head resting upon a book. The chair
is still shown amongst the precious relics of Arqua, which,
from the uninterrupted veneration that has been attached to
every thing relative to this great man from the moment of his
death to the present hour, have, it may be hoped, a better
chance of authenticity than the Shaksperian memorials of
Stratford-upon-Avon.

Arqua (for the last syllable is accented in pronunciation,
although the analogy of the English language has been observed
in the verse) is twelve miles from Padua, and about three
miles on the right of the high road to Rovigo, in the bosom
of the Euganean Hills. After a walk of twenty minutes across a
flat, well-wood