mind,
    Where have so many virtues ever met,
    E’en though those charms have slain my bosom’s weal? 
    He knows not love who has not seen her eyes
    Turn when she sweetly speaks, or smiles, or sighs,
    Or how the power of love can hurt or heal.

Sonnet lxix. is remarkable for the fineness of its closing thought.

    Time was her tresses by the breathing air
    Were wreathed to many a ringlet golden bright,
    Time was her eyes diffused unmeasured light,
    Though now their lovely beams are waxing rare,
    Her face methought that in its blushes show’d
    Compassion, her angelic shape and walk,
    Her voice that seem’d with Heaven’s own speech to talk;
    At these, what wonder that my bosom glow’d! 
    A living sun she seem’d—­a spirit of heaven. 
    Those charms decline:  but does my passion?  No! 
    I love not less—­the slackening of the bow
    Assuages not the wound its shaft has given.

The following sonnet is remarkable for its last four lines having puzzled all the poet’s commentators to explain what he meant by the words “Al man ond’ io scrivo e fatta arnica, a questo volta.”  I agree with De Sade in conjecturing that Laura in receiving some of his verses had touched the hand that presented them, in token of her gratitude.[O]

    In solitudes I’ve ever loved to abide
    By woods and streams, and shunn’d the evil-hearted,
    Who from the path of heaven are foully parted;
    Sweet Tuscany has been to me denied,
    Whose sunny realms I would have gladly haunted,
    Yet still the Sorgue his beauteous hills among
    Has lent auxiliar murmurs to my song,
    And echoed to the plaints my love has chanted. 
    Here triumph’d, too, the poet’s hand that wrote
    These lines—­the power of love has witness’d this. 
    Delicious victory!  I know my bliss,
    She knows it too—­the saint on whom I dote.

Of Petrarch’s poetry that is not amatory, Ugo Foscolo says with justice, that his three political canzoni, exquisite as they are in versification and style, do not breathe that enthusiasm which opened to Pindar’s grasp all the wealth of imagination, all the treasures of historic lore and moral truth, to illustrate and dignify his strain.  Yet the vigour, the arrangement, and the perspicuity of the ideas in these canzoni of Petrarch, the tone of conviction and melancholy in which the patriot upbraids and mourns over his country, strike the heart with such force, as to atone for the absence of grand and exuberant imagery, and of the irresistible impetus which peculiarly belongs to the ode.

Petrarch’s principal Italian poem that is not thrown into the shape of the sonnet is his Trionfi, or Triumphs, in five parts.  Though not consisting of sonnets, however, it has the same amatory and constant allusions to Laura as the greater part of his poetry.  Here, as elsewhere, he recurs from time to time to the history of his passion, its rise, its progress, and its end.  For this purpose, he describes human life in its successive stages, omitting no opportunity of introducing his mistress and himself.