marble chest and set it down here on the hillside, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men.  A simple rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona mandorlato, raised on four thick columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover.  Without emblems, allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by the hills, beneath the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power of words.  Bending here, we feel that Petrarch’s own winged thoughts and fancies, eternal and aerial, ’forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality,’ have congregated to be the ever-ministering and irremovable attendants on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was purest spirit in a veil of flesh.

ON A MOUNTAIN

Milan is shining in sunset on those purple fields; and a score of cities flash back the last red light, which shows each inequality and undulation of Lombardy outspread four thousand feet beneath.  Both ranges, Alps and Apennines, are clear to view; and all the silvery lakes are over-canopied and brought into one picture by flame-litten mists.  Monte Rosa lifts her crown of peaks above a belt of clouds into light of living fire.  The Mischabelhoerner and the Dom rest stationary angel-wings upon the rampart, which at this moment is the wall of heaven.  The pyramid of distant Monte Viso burns like solid amethyst far, far away.  Mont Cervin beckons to his brother, the gigantic Finsteraarhorn, across tracts of liquid ether.  Bells are rising from the villages, now wrapped in gloom, between me and the glimmering lake.  A hush of evening silence falls upon the ridges, cliffs, and forests of this billowy hill, ascending into wave-like crests, and toppling with awful chasms over the dark waters of Lugano.  It is good to be alone here at this hour.  Yet I must rise and go—­passing through meadows, where white lilies sleep in silvery drifts, and asphodel is pale with spires of faintest rose, and narcissus dreams of his own beauty, loading the air with fragrance sweet as some love-music of Mozart.  These fields want only the white figure of Persephone to make them poems:  and in this twilight one might fancy that the queen had left her throne by Pluto’s side, to mourn for her dead youth among the flowers uplifted between earth and heaven.  Nay, they are poems now, these fields; with that unchanging background of history, romance, and human life—­the Lombard plain, against whose violet breadth the blossoms bend their faint heads to the evening air.  Downward we hurry, on pathways where the beeches meet, by silent farms, by meadows honey-scented, deep in dew.  The columbine stands tall and still on those green slopes of shadowy grass.  The nightingale sings now, and now is hushed again.  Streams murmur through the darkness, where the growth of trees, heavy with honeysuckle and wild rose, is thickest.  Fireflies begin to flit above the growing corn.  At last the plain