I once beheld on earth celestial graces, And heavenly beauties scarce to mortals known, Whose memory lends nor joy nor grief alone, But all things else bewilders and effaces.
I saw how tears had left their weary traces Within those eyes that once like sunbeams shone, I heard those lips breathe low and plaintive moan, Whose spell might once have taught the hills their places.
Love, wisdom, courage, tenderness, and truth, Made ill their mourning strains more high and dear Than ever wove sweet sounds for mortal ear;And heaven seemed listening in such saddest ruth The very leaves upon the boughs to soothe, Such passionate sweetness filled the atmosphere.
These sonnets are in Petrarch's earlier manner; but the death of Laura brought a change. Look at yonder schooner coming down the bay, straight toward us; she is hauled close to the wind, her jib is white in the sunlight, her larger sails are touched with the same snowy lustre, and all the swelling canvas is rounded into such lines of beauty as scarcely anything else in the world--hardly even the perfect outlines of the human form--can give. Now she comes up into the wind, and goes about with a strong flapping of the sails, smiting on the ear at a half-mile's distance; then she glides off on the other tack, showing the shadowed side of her sails, until she reaches the distant zone of haze. So change the sonnets after Laura's death, growing shadowy as they recede, until the very last seems to merge itself in the blue distance.
SONNET 251.
"Gli occhi di ch' io parlai."
Those eyes, 'neath which my passionate rapture rose, The arms, hands, feet, the beauty that erewhile Could my own soul from its own self beguile, And in a separate world of dreams enclose, The hair's bright tresses, full of golden glows, And the soft lightning of the angelic smile That changed this earth to some celestial isle, Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn, Left dark without the light I loved in vain, Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;Dead is the source of all my amorous strain, Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn, And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.
"And yet I live!" What a pause is implied before these words! the drawing of a long breath, immeasurably long; like that vast interval of heart-beats that precedes Shakespeare's "Since Cleopatra died." I can think of no other passage in literature that has in it the same wide spaces of emotion.
The following sonnet seems to me the most stately and concentrated in the whole volume. It is the sublimity of a despair not to be relieved by utterance.
SONNET 253.
"Soleasi nel mio cor."
She ruled in beauty o'er this heart of mine, A noble lady in a humble home, And now her time for heavenly bliss has come, 'T is I am mortal proved, and she divine.
The soul that all its blessings must resign, And love whose light no more on earth finds room Might rend the rocks with pity for their doom, Yet none their sorrows can in words enshrine;They weep within my heart; and ears are deaf Save mine alone, and I am crushed with care, And naught remains to me save mournful breath.
Assuredly but dust and shade we are, Assuredly desire is blind and brief, Assuredly its hope but ends in death.
In a later strain he rises to that dream which is more than earth's realities.
SONNET 261.
"Levommi il mio pensiero."
Dreams bore my fancy to that region where She dwells whom here I seek, but cannot see.
'Mid those who in the loftiest heaven be I looked on her, less haughty and more fair.
She touched my hand, she said, "Within this sphere, If hope deceive not, thou shalt dwell with me:
I filled thy life with war's wild agony;
Mine own day closed ere evening could appear.
My bliss no human brain can understand;
I wait for thee alone, and that fair veil Of beauty thou dost love shall wear again."Why was she silent then, why dropped my hand Ere those delicious tones could quite avail To bid my mortal soul in heaven remain?
