Before she came, I had a mind to prove the celebrity of a poet on the spot where he lived and died,—­on his very hearthstone, as it were.  So I asked the lout, who stood gnawing a stick and shifting his weight from one foot to the other,—­

“When did Petrarch live here?”

“Ah!  I don’t remember him.”

“Who was he?”

“A poet, signor.”

Certainly the first response was not encouraging, but the last revealed that even to the heavy and clouded soul of this lout the divine fame of the poet had penetrated—­and he a lout in the village where Petrarch lived and ought to be first forgotten.  He did not know when Petrarch had lived there,—­a year ago, perhaps, or many centuries,—­but he knew that Petrarch was a poet.  A weight of doubt was lifted from my spirit, and I responded cheerfully to some observations on the weather offered by a rustic matron who was pitching manure on the little hill-slope near the house.  When, at last, the custodian came and opened the gate to us, we entered a little grassy yard from which a flight of steps led to Petrarch’s door.  A few flowers grew wild among the grass, and a fig-tree leaned its boughs against the wall.  The figs on it were green, though they hung ripe and blackening on every other tree in Arqua.  Some ivy clung to the stones, and from this and the fig-tree, as we came away, we plucked memorial leaves, and blended them with flowers which the youth of Arqua picked and forced upon us for remembrance.

A quaint old door opened into the little stone house, and admitted us to a kind of wide passage-way with rooms on either side; and at the end opposite to which we entered, another door opened upon a balcony.  From this balcony we looked down on Petrarch’s garden, which, presently speaking, is but a narrow space with more fruit than flowers in it.  Did Petrarch use to sit and meditate in this garden?  For me I should better have liked a chair on the balcony, with the further and lovelier prospect on every hand of village-roofs, sloping hills all gray with olives, and the broad, blue Lombard plain, sweeping from heaven to heaven below.

The walls of the passage-way are frescoed (now very faintly) in illustration of the loves of Petrarch and Laura, with verses from the sonnets inscribed to explain the illustrations.  In all these Laura prevails as a lady of a singularly long waist and stiff movements, and Petrarch, with his face tied up and a lily in his hand, contemplates the flower in mingled botany and toothache.  There is occasionally a startling literalness in the way the painter has rendered some of the verses.  I remember with peculiar interest the illustration of a lachrymose passage concerning a river of tears, wherein the weeping Petrarch, stretched beneath a tree, had already started a small creek of tears, which was rapidly swelling to a flood with the torrent from his eyes.  I attribute these frescos to a later date than that of the poet’s