e for
the sights and sounds of the country, and that love of its quiet which
clung to him till the end of his days. The song of the nightingale,
the whisper of the wind, the murmur of the stream, all re-echo
constantly through his verse; and even when he is most rapturous
about Laura's beauty, he will often pause to tell of the grass and
flowers on which she treads.

No doubt, also, it was through the healthy out-door life which he led
as a child at Ancisa that he gained the physical strength which
afterward enabled him to become one of the best horsemen and swordsmen
of that day of bold riding and hard fighting. Eletta at that time
worked well and wisely for both the body and mind of the future poet.

But the mother and son were not to stay always in that quiet retreat.
After some time the elder Petrarch, finding that he could not get
permission to return to Florence, sent for his wife and boy, and they
went all together to Avignon, where they settled.

Proud of his son's talents, the elder Petrarch chalked out for him a
grand career as an advocate, which was to end in the judge's ermine.
He therefore sent Francesco to study law, first at Montpellier, and
then at Bologna.

When Petrarch was twenty-two both his parents died. Soon after that he
joyfully threw away his law-books, and resolved to live for
literature, and literature alone. He went back to Avignon. But the
ways of the town were not much to his taste, and its whirl and noise
distracted his mind. He therefore spent part of the fortune inherited
from his father in buying a small estate at Val Chiusa, a pretty,
quiet nook some miles from Avignon. Thither he retired, and spent his
time with his pen and his books, only now and then seeing a few
friends who came out from the town to visit him.

The young man was not, however, always satisfied with this monotonous
way of life. About this period he took a long journey, in which he saw
many of the European capitals, and formed, among the learned of
foreign lands, friendships which he afterward kept up through constant
correspondence. The world already began to speak of Petrarch as a
rising man of letters.

One Good Friday he was in the Church of Santa Chiara, at Avignon.
There he saw a face which made him forget his prayers; a face from
which the dark eyes of the South looked forth, though the bright hair
of the North waved around it; a face which somehow exactly fitted into
the niche of his ideal; a face whic