This lovely spirit, if ordain’d to leave
    Its mortal tenement before its time,
    Heaven’s fairest habitation shall receive
    And welcome her to breathe its sweetest clime. 
    If she establish her abode between
    Mars and the planet-star of Beauty’s queen,
    The sun will be obscured, so dense a cloud
    Of spirits from adjacent stars will crowd
    To gaze upon her beauty infinite. 
    Say that she fixes on a lower sphere,
    Beneath the glorious sun, her beauty soon
    Will dim the splendour of inferior stars—­
    Of Mars, of Venus, Mercury, and the Moon. 
    She’ll choose not Mars, but higher place than Mars;
    She will eclipse all planetary light,
    And Jupiter himself will seem less bright.

I trust that I have enough to say in favour of Petrarch to satisfy his rational admirers; but I quote this sonnet as an example of the worst style of Petrarch’s poetry.  I make the English reader welcome to rate my power of translating it at the very lowest estimation.  He cannot go much further down than myself in the scale of valuation, especially if he has Italian enough to know that the exquisite mechanical harmony of Petrarch’s style is beyond my reach.  It has been alleged that this sonnet shows how much the mind of Petrarch had been influenced by his Platonic studies; but if Plato had written poetry he would never have been so extravagant.

Petrarch, on his return from Germany, had found the old Pope, John XXII., intent on two speculations, to both of which he lent his enthusiastic aid.  One of them was a futile attempt to renew the crusades, from which Europe had reposed for a hundred years.  The other was the transfer of the holy seat to Rome.  The execution of this plan, for which Petrarch sighed as if it were to bring about the millennium, and which was not accomplished by another Pope without embroiling him with his Cardinals, was nevertheless more practicable than capturing Jerusalem.  We are told by several Italian writers that the aged Pontiff, moved by repeated entreaties from the Romans, as well as by the remorse of his conscience, thought seriously of effecting this restoration; but the sincerity of his intentions is made questionable by the fact that he never fixed himself at Rome.  He wrote, it is true, to Rome in 1333, ordering his palaces and gardens to be repaired; but the troubles which continued to agitate the city were alleged by him as too alarming for his safety there, and he repaired to Bologna to wait for quieter times.

On both of the above subjects, namely, the insane crusades and the more feasible restoration of the papal court to Rome, Petrarch wrote with devoted zeal; they are both alluded to in his twenty-second sonnet.