"Petrarch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contribution to the specimens required by the Pope. The audacious specimen was accepted as the most conclusive, Giotto was chosen as the Pope's painter for the occasion, and from the incident arose the Italian proverb 'round as the o of Giotto.' Giotto was the friend of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, especially of Dante, to whom the grandeur of some of the painter's designs has been vaguely enough attributed. The poet of the 'Inferno' ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... his Roe, like a dryed Hering. O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified? Now is he for the numbers that Petrarch flowed in: Laura to his Lady, was a kitchen wench, marrie she had a better Loue to berime her: Dido a dowdie, Cleopatra a Gipsie, Hellen and Hero, hildings and Harlots: Thisbie a gray eie or so, but not to the purpose. Signior ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Eleanor and her daughter Mary of Champagne were a form of religion, and if you care to see its evangels, you had best go directly to Dante and Petrarch, or, if you like it better, to Don Quixote de la Mancha. The religion is dead as Demeter, and its art alone survives as, on the whole, the highest expression of man's thought or emotion; but in its day it was almost as practical as it now is fanciful. Eleanor and her daughter Mary ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... Petrarch wrote that Venice was the home of justice and equity, refuge of the good; rich in gold, but richer in renown; built on marble, but founded on the surer foundation of a city worthy of veneration and glory. But this is no longer the Venice he described; no longer the city of grasping ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... much hope that way for our unhappy lovers. The world might cry out a little at first, but success justifies everything. Meanwhile, Robert and Mrs. Parflete have formed a resolution not to meet again for a year or more. After that, they hope to be on the unearthly terms of Laura and her Petrarch. It is magnificent, but is it love? I long to hear your views on the subject. I have no influence over you; I wish I had. I am the most sincere of all your friends. The others either care too little for you, or too much for themselves, to run the risk of giving ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... sciences must include arts, which are but country cousins to them, or a new compartment must be established for their accommodation. Once more, how to cope with the everlasting difficulty of 'Works'? In what category to place Dante, Petrarch, Swedenborg, Burke, Coleridge, Carlyle, or a hundred more? Where, again, is Poetry to stand? I apprehend that it must take its place, the first place without doubt, in Art; for while it is separated from Painting and her other ...
— On Books and the Housing of Them • William Ewart Gladstone
... considerations to make the outcome of their plays tragical, but practically all other expositions of the poet's double affections are likewise tragic. Cale Young Rice chooses another famous Renaissance lover for the hero of A Night in Avignon, a play with this theme. Here Petrarch, in a fit of impatience with his long loyalty to a hopeless love for Laura, turns to a light woman for consolation. According to the accepted mode, he refuses to tolerate Laura's name on the lips of his fancy. Laura, who has chosen this inconvenient moment to become convinced of the purity of ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... acknowledge; or, perhaps I should say, than the world has thought of acknowledging. Blot out from England's history the names of Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, and Milton only, and how much of her glory would you blot out with them! Take from Italy such names as Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Michel Angelo, and Raphael, and how much would still be wanting to the completeness of her glory! How would the history of Spain look if the leaves were torn out, on which are written the names of Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon! What would be the fame of Portugal, ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... interesting, and sometimes the only interesting parts of their writings; and if they be sincere, we seldom complain of the minuteness or prolixity of these personal memorials. The lives of the younger Pliny, of Petrarch, and of Erasmus, are expressed in the epistles, which they themselves have given to the world. The essays of Montaigne and Sir William Temple bring us home to the houses and bosoms of the authors: we smile without contempt at the headstrong passions of Benevenuto Cellini, and the gay follies ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... see how she prays God to send some one to rescue her from these barbarous cruelties and oppressions. We see too how ready and eager she is to follow any standard, were there only some one to raise it."], and the rise of a common language, which, under such masters as Dante and Petrarch, had become a great medium for literary expression, the people of the peninsula had not built up a national monarchy like those of western Europe nor had they even preserved the form of allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire. This was due to several significant events ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... far indulged his choleric humour as to fell to the ground a somewhat tardy bishop during the celebration of a holy solemnity. We hear of a fiery temper, accustomed to command, elated by success, and in which, on the confession of Petrarch, who was personally well informed regarding it, valour predominated over prudence. These are the unsettled elements upon which the Tempter best loves to work; but the insanity and extravagance with which we must charge Faliero, if we suppose his attempt to overthrow the government ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 481, March 19, 1831 • Various
... Petrarch's Laura, and other real and imaginary loves of the poets, have been immortalized in song, but we doubt whether any of the numerous objects of poetical adoration were more worthy of honor than Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, the friend and defender of Edgar A. Poe. That he should have inspired so deep ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... of the tribe of the Benou Udhreh, renowned for their passionate sincerity in love-matters. He is celebrated as the lover of Butheineh, as Petrarch of Laura, and died A.D. 701, ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... need say much about the classical movement in art and literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... as Petrarch wrote, and as we may say of Literature. If you ask me whether it will pay you to employ the superfluities of your cleverness in writing reviews and sketches and stories,—why, certainly, do so by all ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the base of a lofty calcareous cliff, crowned with the ruins of the chapel of Groseaux, 11th cent. The stream that issues from the spring is soon strong enough to set in motion the machinery of paper, silk, and flour mills. Any one may visit the silk mills. In 1345 Petrarch ascended Mont Ventoux from Malaucene. The ascent from this place is more difficult, but more picturesque than from Bedoin and requires 2 hours more. On the side of the mountain are the springs—Angel, 3826 ft.; Puits de Mont-Serein, 4774 ft.; ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the pure white diamond Dante brought To Beatrice; the sapphire Laura wore When Petrarch cut it sparkling out of thought; The ruby Shakespeare hewed from his heart's core; The dark, deep emerald that Rossetti wrought For his own soul, to wear for ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... easy and confidential in her company. The Tutor is not only a poet, but is a great reader of the poetry of many languages. It so happened that Number Five was puzzled, one day, in reading a sonnet of Petrarch, and had recourse to the Tutor to explain the difficult passage. She found him so thoroughly instructed, so clear, so much interested, so ready to impart knowledge, and so happy in his way of doing it, that she asked him if he would not allow her the privilege of reading an Italian author under ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is made interesting by association with illustrious memories. Coblontz introduces the tribute to Marceau; Clarens an almost complete review, in five verses, of Rousseau; Lausanne and Ferney the quintessence of criticism on Gibbon and Voltaire. A tomb in Arqua suggests Petrarch; the grass-grown streets of Ferrara lead in the lines on Tasso; the white walls of the Etrurian Athens bring back Alfieri and Michael Angelo, and the prose bard of the hundred tales, and Dante, "buried by ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... him, his tones as Petrarch's tender, With many a speaking vision on the wall, The fire, a-blaze, flashing the studio fender, Closed in from London shouts and ceaseless brawl— Twas you brought Nature to the visiting, Till she herself seemed ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... calling was chiefly to give him a description of the Countess of ———'s rout on Saturday last, in Berkeley-square, where I intimated I should be, when I last fell in with him. 'Oh Cielo Empireo.' I'm enchanted yet, positively enchanted! I ought to have Petrarch's pen to describe such a scene and such dresses. Then should a robe of Tulle vie with that of Laura at the church door—that dress of 'Vert parsemee de violets.' But softly, let us begin with the beginning, Belier mon ami. What a galaxy of all the stars ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... angle of the door-post, and his long legs stretched out, while he held a large book open on his knee, and occasionally made a dash with his hand at an inquisitive fly, with an air of interest stronger than that excited by the finely-printed copy of Petrarch which he kept open at one place, as if he were ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... his successors proceeded to the safeguarding of their temporal welfare in truly noble fashion; and scarcely fifty years later they had become so well pleased with their new residence that the magnificent Clement VI refused to leave in spite of the supplications of Petrarch and Rienzi and ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... in radiating force, not only exerting power, but communicating and even creating it. Thus Dante raised and drew after him a host of great spirits—Petrarch, Boccacio, Tasso, and many more. From him Milton learnt to bear the stings of evil tongues and the contumely of evil days; and long years after, Byron, thinking of Dante under the pine-trees of Ravenna, was incited to attune his harp to loftier strains than he had ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... modern craze for making one's philosophy, religion, politics, and temper all of a piece, of seeking in all incidents for opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to Dante. In the "Pentemeron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb of Petrarch, asserts that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the Inferno and Purgatorio are detestable both in poetry and principle; the higher parts are excellent, indeed." Dante's powers of language, he allows, "are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... the state of the national heart, it was not less the case during the present period. The preaching was of the most formal and methodical texture. It assumed a rhetorical and poetical appearance; the people calling it the Italian style. Petrarch had given shape to Italian thought, and through his influence Germany became sated with poetic imagery and overwrought fancy. Sagittarius founded a stipend for the preaching of a yearly sermon in the University Church "which should be more a practical illustration of Christian doctrine than of ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... and together we strolled to the river-side along that embankment, the favourite walk of Dante and of Petrarch, of Raphael and of Michelangelo. All was silent, for the great ponderous palaces lining the river were closed till winter, and there were no ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... performed for Goton. All fatalities combined have for result a flower. A vague Rambouillet Palace is superposed upon the forbidding silhouette of the Salpetriere. The leprous wall of evil, suddenly covered with blossoms, affords a pendant to the wreath of Juliet. The sonnets of Petrarch, that flight of the ideal which soars in the shadow of souls, venture through the twilight towards this abjection and suffering, attracted by one knows not what obscure affinity, even as a swarm of bees is sometimes seen humming over a dungheap from ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... a visit to Vaucluse should by no means be omitted, not so much, perhaps, for Petrarch's sake as for the interest of the drive, and for the marvel of the fountain of the Sorgues. For some time after leaving Avignon you jog along the level country between avenues of plane-trees; then comes a hilly ridge, on which the ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... true they were more interested in hearing that it was: "after he had come under the spell of Petrarch and Boccaccio that Chaucer produced his wondrous Tales," but it appeared their interest was due to some slight misapprehension. Daphne felt the fearful joy of suppressed mirth combined with the danger of detection as she heard Edna explaining with laborious ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... a lady of Avignon, the wife of Hugues de Sade, n['e]e Laura de Noves, the mistress of the poet Petrarch. (See ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... charm of the Lieder themselves. But these Lieder are, for probable freedom from indebtedness and intrinsic exquisiteness of phrase and rhythm, unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled. To compare Walther to Petrarch, and to talk of the one being superior or inferior to the other, is to betray hopeless insensibility to the very rudiments of criticism. They are absolutely different,—the one the embodiment of stately form and laboured intellectual effort—of ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... King and Queen, the King of Scots, and all the magnates north of the Trent, together with a multitude of nobles and many others, were present at his enthronization. It is noteworthy that during his stay at Avignon, probably in 1330, he made the acquaintance of Petrarch, who has left us a brief account of their intercourse. In 1332 Richard visited Cambridge, as one of the King's commissioners, to inquire into the state of the King's Scholars there, and perhaps then became a member of the ...
— The Philobiblon of Richard de Bury • Richard de Bury
... are to be found in the English Apolonius and Silla of Barnabe Riche, and there is reason to conjecture a lost English play on the subject. The Taming of the Shrew, based on an extant older play, draws also on Gascoigne's version of Ariosto's I Suppositi; and the echoes of Petrarch in the Sonnets may well have come through French and English imitators. The introduction of stock types from the Italian drama, such as the pedant and the braggart-soldier, can be accounted for by the previous knowledge of these in England, and does not imply a first-hand reading of Italian ...
— The Facts About Shakespeare • William Allan Nielson
... a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind. As a matter of fact, and in the process ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... at last, the Romans sent an embassy to him to urge his return to Rome. The hope had long been at the root of Rienzi's life, and he must have already attained to a considerable reputation of learning and eloquence, since he was chosen to be one of the ambassadors. Petrarch conceived the highest opinion of him at their first meeting, and never withdrew his friendship from him to the end; the great poet joined his prayers with those of the Roman envoys, and supported Rienzi's eloquence with his ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... wit who has to laugh alone. I will not take upon myself to say that Landor was without humour; he has certainly a delicate gracefulness which may be classed with the finer kinds of humour; but if anybody (to take one instance) will read the story which Chaucer tells to Boccaccio and Petrarch and pronounce it to be amusing, I can only say that his notions of humour differ materially from mine. Some of his wrathful satire against kings and priests has a vigour which is amusing; but the tact which enables him to avoid errors of taste of ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... them in the trampled marketplaces of two noisy, turbulent, unreasonable, pestilent little democratic cities,—Athens and Florence. Extinguish the architecture and the sculpture, the poetry and the philosophy of Attica; obliterate from the sum of civilization the names of Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli,—of Cimabue, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Brunelleschi, Michel Angelo,—of Brunetto, Ficino, Politian; and how much diminished will be ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Sonnets have produced sonnetteers for every object in nature, visible or invisible; and her elegant translations of Petrarch have procured the Italian bard many an English dress that he would have ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... bold; when she is thirty she will be fat and perhaps dispensing cheap wine in a low cabaret. And you called me Rosalind between times and signed your verses and letters Orlando! You quoted from Petrarch and said I was your Laura. My faith! man is a curious animal. I have been told that I am beautiful; and from me you turned to a Catharine! I suspect she is ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... both of body and mind left no room for it, and hence the bracing quality of their literature compared with that of recent times, its tonic property, that seems almost too astringent to palates relaxed by a daintier diet. The first great example of the degenerate modern tendency was Petrarch, who may be said to have given it impulse and direction. A more perfect specimen of the type has not since appeared. An intellectual voluptuary, a moral dilettante, the first instance of that character, since too common, the gentleman in search of a sensation, seeking a solitude at Vaucluse ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... which it retained throughout the age of the Renaissance. To him, again, belongs the glory of having first collected books for the express purpose of founding a public library. This project had occupied the mind of Petrarch, and its utility had been recognised by Coluccio de' Salutati, but no one had as yet arisen to accomplish it. "Being passionately fond of literature, Messer Palla always kept copyists in his own house and outside it, of the best who were in Florence, both for Greek and Latin books; and all the ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... I have seen myself compared, personally or poetically, in English, French, German (as interpreted to me), Italian, and Portuguese, within these nine years, to Rousseau, Goethe, Young, Aretine, Timon of Athens, Dante, Petrarch, 'an alabaster vase, lighted up within,' Satan, Shakspeare, Buonaparte, Tiberius, AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Harlequin, the Clown, Sternhold and Hopkins, to the phantasmagoria, to Henry the Eighth, to Chenier, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... well believe the anecdote told by Squarzafichi in his life of Petrarch, and taken from Joseph Brivius, a contemporary of the poet, how once at the court of the Visconti, when Petrarch and other noblemen and gentlemen were present, Galeazzo Visconti told his son, who was ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch's house at Arqua, where the grandeur of the past is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than the poet's visitors ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... same reason that Petrarch's friend said that he read it unmoved," replied Mrs. Granby: "because he could not believe that such a woman ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... different animals—one by elephants, another by lions, and so on, and crowded with mythological figures and attributes.—A friend of mine, who examined them this summer, tells me, that he thinks the subjects are either taken from the triumphs of Petrarch, or imitated from the triumphs introduced in the Polifilo. Graphic representations of allegories are susceptible of so many variations, that an artist, embodying the ideas of the poet, might produce a representation bearing a close resemblance ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... in so reading they seem clear and connected, fanciful and far-drawn interpretations will not be adopted. We should not distort or modify their meaning in order to infer that they are imitations of Petrarch, or that the genius of the poet, cribbed and confined by the fashion of the time, forgot to soar, and limped and waddled in the footsteps of the inconspicuous sonneteers ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson
... read, and Boaz probably would never have married into the family, had they possessed that accomplishment,—that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, nor the Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor the three hundred and sixty-five wives of Mohammed;—but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon could read altogether too well, while the case of Saint Brigitta, who brought forth twelve children and twelve books, was clearly ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... stinks. Let, therefore, your illustrious house take up this charge with that courage and hope with which all just enterprises are undertaken, so that under its standard our native country may be ennobled, and under its auspices may be verified that saying of Petrarch: ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... Caesar's Gallic War. The restored Greek Empire of the Palaeologi was then fast dropping to pieces. The Genoese colony of Pera usurped the trade of Constantinople and acted as an independent state; and it brings us very near the modern world to remember that while Planudes was the contemporary of Petrarch and Doria, Andronicus III., the grandson and successor of Andronicus II., was married, as a suitable match, to Agnes of Brunswick, and again after her ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's Divine Comedy, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance that gave us Petrarch, and Raphael's frescoes, and Palladian architecture, and formal French tragedy, and St. Paul's Cathedral, and Pope's poetry, and everything that is made from without and by dead rules, and does not spring from within through some spirit informing it. But wherever ...
— De Profundis • Oscar Wilde
... to the continent on a diplomatic mission. He seems to have succeeded so well that during the next ten years he was repeatedly sent abroad in the royal service. He visited Italy twice and may thus have met the Italian poet Petrarch. These journeys inspired Chaucer with a desire to study Italian literature,—a literature that had just been enriched by the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... think of nothing in the world but her, that I can do, write, plan, nothing without her, that once she smiles on me I will write her great love-poems, greater than Byron's, greater than Heine's—the real Song of Songs, which is Pinchas's—that I will make her immortal as Dante made Beatrice, as Petrarch made Laura, that I walk about wretched, bedewing the pavements with my tears, that I sleep not by night nor eat by day—you will tell her this?" He laid his ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the birds will soon be flown: Our Cambridge wit resumes his gown: Our English Petrarch trundles down To Devon's valley: Why, when our Maga's out of town, Stand shilly-shally? The table-talk of London still Shall serve for chat by rock and rill, And you again may have your fill Of season'd mirth, But not if spade your chamber ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... from the heart it goes to the heart. As its object, however, is not in nature, but artificially produced by the understanding, it has only a logical reality, and the feeling is not purely human. It was not an illusion that Heloise had for Abelard, Petrarch for Laura, Saint Preux for his Julia, Werther for his Charlotte; Agathon, Phanias, and Peregrinus—in Wieland—for the object of their dreams: the feeling is true, only the object is factitious and outside nature. If their thought ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... beautiful lines were appropriate to more than one poet. Freedom from affectation, and a genuine love of her subject, make her biographies most readable, and for the ordinary reader there is a fund of information. The next life—that of Petrarch—is equally attractive; in fact, there is little that can exceed the interest of lives of these immortal beings when written—with the comprehension here displayed. Even the complicated history of the period is made clear, and ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... there an honor which reflected more credit than even the smiles of his holiness—the brightest of the Italian poets, Petrarch of never dying fame—bestowed upon him his acquaintance and lasting friendship. De Bury entered Avignon for the first time in the same year that Petrarch took up his residence there, in the house of Colonna, bishop of Lombes: two such enlightened scholars ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... developed, and do not, consequently, stand in the way of this caprice. In Homer we find several examples of it; the Books of Moses, the oldest written memorial of the primitive world, are, as is well known, full of them. On the other hand, poets of a very cultivated taste, like Petrarch, or orators, like Cicero, have delighted in them. Whoever, in Richard the Second, is disgusted with the affecting play of words of the dying John of Gaunt on his own name, should remember that the same thing ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... get it from her at a safe distance? Petrarch didn't see half as much of Laura, nor Dante of Beatrice, as you see of Ann now; and yet they wrote first-rate poetry—at least so I'm told. They never exposed their idolatry to the test of domestic familiarity; and it lasted them to their ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... release. By this treaty Maine, Touraine, and Poitou in the south, Normandy, Guisnes, Ponthieu, and Calais in the west were ceded to the English king. On its rejection Edward in 1360 poured ravaging over the wasted land. Famine however proved its best defence. "I could not believe," said Petrarch of this time, "that this was the same France which I had seen so rich and flourishing. Nothing presented itself to my eyes but a fearful solitude, an utter poverty, land uncultivated, houses in ruins. Even the neighbourhood of Paris showed everywhere ...
— History of the English People, Volume II (of 8) - The Charter, 1216-1307; The Parliament, 1307-1400 • John Richard Green
... his Penelope, and neighbors are invited to participate in his better fourth or fifth, as the polygamic case may be. Perhaps, years after, when with less demonstrative nations the memory of the beloved one would have passed away, the Fijian Fidelio may smack his lips, and exclaim, with Petrarch's fervor,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... concerned and jealous, strove to interest her in literature, and urged her to translate Petrarch. Madame Recamier speedily recovered herself. She listened graciously to the admonitions of Montmorency, and she consented to undertake Petrarch, but made little progress in the work. Still, as far as her feelings for Chateaubriand were concerned, the efforts of her friends were in vain. He occupied ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... explored Italy almost from end to end; but the literary associations of the various towns were their principal charm. To him, Verona stood for Catullus, Brindisi for Virgil, Sorrento for Tasso, Florence for "the all Etruscan three," [93] Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, Reggio and Ferrara for Ariosto. It was from Ariosto, perhaps through Camoens, who adopted it, that he took his life motto, "Honour, ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... have loved and perpetuated their love. Some of them have succeeded in engraving it on the tablets of history, like Henry IV; others, like Petrarch, have made literary preserves of it; some have availed themselves for that purpose of the newspapers, wherein the happenings of the day are recorded, and where they figured among those who had strangled themselves, shot themselves, or who had been shot ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... introduced into English poetry by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. Their experiments in the sonnet were published in Tottel's Miscellany in 1557, and were prompted by an admiration of Petrarch and other Italian models. Italy was almost certainly the original home of the sonnet (sonnetItal. sonetto, a little sound, or short strain, from suono, sound), and there it has been assiduously cultivated since the thirteenth century. In the fourteenth ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... old book at even as I read Fast fading words adown my shadowy page, I crossed a tale of how, in other age, At Arqua, with his books around him, sped The word to Petrarch; and with noble head Bowed gently o'er his volume that sweet sage To Silence paid his willing seigniorage. And they who found ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... life: to shut herself up in the tomb in which the poor woman brooded over her martyrs. But that was not the girl's way of honoring the dead. At the moment when the first shot was fired on Menotti's house she had been reading Petrarch's Ode to the Lords of Italy, and the lines l'antico valor Ne Vitalici cor non e ancor morto had lodged like a bullet in her brain. From the day of her marriage she began to take a share in the silent work which was going on throughout Italy. Milan was at that time the centre of the ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... happens that the mind of each veils its passion under a different appearance, and beneath a smiling visage, gay beneath a sombre air."—Petrarch.] ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... in the neighbourhood of Leonardo and Michelangelo. As an artist he was, it is true, not endowed with the profoundest sense for the significant, yet within the sphere of common humanity who has produced anything more genial than his "Portrait of a Lady"—probably his wife—with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of himself—these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James" ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... piece, Even in that Phoebus-guarded ground Pausanias on his travels found Good poems, if he look'd, more rare (Though many) than good statues were— For these, in truth, were everywhere. Of bards full many a stroke divine In Dante's, Petrarch's, Tasso's line, The land of Ariosto show'd; And yet, e'en there, the canvas glow'd With triumphs, a yet ampler brood, Of Raphael and his brotherhood. And nobly perfect, in our day Of haste, half-work, and disarray, Profound yet touching, sweet yet strong, Hath risen Goethe's, Wordsworth's ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... poets. The famous Aurelio Brandolini, who died in 1497, was wont to improvise to the strains of the lute during banquets in the Vatican and in Lucretia's palace. Caesar's favorite, Serafino of Aquila, the Petrarch of his age, who died in Rome in the year 1500, still a young man, aspired to the ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... observe their physiognomy too; he cannot see their style. With the Latin works of writers who think for themselves, the case is different, and their style is visible; writers, I mean, who have not condescended to any sort of imitation, such as Scotus Erigena, Petrarch, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and many others. An affectation in style is like making grimaces. Further, the language in which a man writes is the physiognomy of the nation to which he belongs; and here there are many hard and fast ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Plato, and the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, translated by Leonard the Aretine. Here, among the numerous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna, Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum, Apuleius, Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch. Here, with Ovid's verses, is the Commentary on Dante, and his Divine Comedy. Here, rarest of all, is a Greek Dictionary, the silent father of ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... as a poetic language, those fabulous personages, those forms of the [68]supernatural in nature, which had given them such dear delight in the poems of their great masters. Nay, even at this day what scholar of genial taste will not so far sympathize with them, as to read with pleasure in Petrarch, Chaucer, or Spenser, what he would perhaps condemn as puerile in ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... anonymous writers of Gloriana's time produced verses as good as the best of either Wyatt or Surrey; but these two at least discovered the way which, once found, became comparatively easy to tread. They introduced the sonnet, learnt from Petrarch; Surrey (the same who was executed on the eve of Henry's death) wrote the first English blank verse. The moribund tradition of the successors of Chaucer continued to find better exponents in Scotland than in England, in the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... in that unhappy phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which unhappily Petrarch was the begetter. ...
— Progress and History • Various
... love's sake, both, our Florence in her prime Turned boldly on all comers to her states, As heroes turned their shields in antique time Emblazoned with honourable acts. And though The gates are blank now of such images, And Petrarch looks no more from Nicolo Toward dear Arezzo, 'twixt the acacia-trees, Nor Dante, from gate Gallo—still we know, Despite the razing of the blazonries, Remains the consecration of the shield: The dead heroic faces will start out On all these gates, if foes should take the field, And blend ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... charge against physicians who showed a talent for investigation was that of Mohammedanism and Averroism; and Petrarch stigmatized Averroists as "men who deny Genesis ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... row of nightingales in full chorus. This delightful bird had given me a rich treat before, at the fountain of Vaucluse. After visiting the tomb of Laura, at Avignon, I went to see this fountain—a noble one of itself, and rendered forever famous by the songs of Petrarch, who lived near it. I arrived there somewhat fatigued, and sat down by the fountain to repose myself. It gushes, of the size of a river, from a secluded valley of the mountain, the ruins of Petrarch's chateau being perched on a rock two hundred feet ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... French literature. Accordingly, we never recollect his referring for any purpose, either of argument or illustration, to a French classic. Latin, from his regular scholastic training, naturally he read with a scholar's fluency; and indeed, he read constantly in authors, such as Petrarch, Erasmus, Calvin, &c., whom he could not then have found in translations. But Coleridge had not cultivated an acquaintance with the delicacies of classic Latinity. And it is remarkable that Wordsworth, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... amato la solitaria vita," Petrarch, referring to himself, declared, and Tiberius might have said the same thing. He was in love with solitude; ill with efforts for the unattained; sick with the ingratitude of man. Presently it was decided that he had lived long enough. He was suffocated—beneath a mattress at that. Caesar had ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... though but an ear or an eyelash, at a jalosy, and hide all the rest; Magpies at the door, Capre n' i giardini, Angeli in Strada, Sante in chiesa, Diavoli in casa. Then come I and ransack the minstrels' lines for amorous turns, not forgetting those which Petrarch wasted on that French jilt Laura, the sliest of them all; and I lay you the whole bundle of spice at the feet of the only females worthy amorous incense; to wit, the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... imperial manner comes to its climax. Statius had, to a certain degree, gone back to Virgil; Quintilian goes back to Cicero without hesitation or reserve. He is the first of the Ciceronians; Lactantius in the fourth century, John of Salisbury in the twelfth, Petrarch in the fourteenth, Erasmus in the sixteenth, all in a way continue the tradition which he founded; nor is it surprising that the discovery of a complete manuscript of the Institutio Oratoria, early in the fifteenth century was hailed by ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... Decameron," the title being derived from the Greek words signifying "ten days." This collection of a hundred stories is certainly one of the world's great books. Many English writers of the first order have gone to it for inspiration. Boccaccio's friend, Petrarch, was so delighted with the tale of Griselda, with which the work concludes, that he learnt it off by heart. Chaucer developed it into the finest of all his stories. Dryden, Keats, and Tennyson have also been inspired by Boccaccio; while Lessing has made the Italian story-teller's allegory of "The ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... all write with the same certainty of words, and purity of phrase, to which the Italians first arrived, and after them the French; at least that we might advance so far, as our tongue is capable of such a standard. It would mortify an Englishman to consider, that from the time of Boccace and of Petrarch, the Italian has varied very little; and that the English of Chaucer, their contemporary, is not to be understood without the help of an old dictionary. But their Goth and Vandal had the fortune to be grafted on ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... one of the most polished nations of Europe. The light which art and literature then shed over Italy, was reflected on every nation whose language emanated from the same source as that of Dante and Petrarch. It might have been expected that a general improvement of manners would be the natural consequence of this noble awakening of the mind, this sublime soaring of the imagination. But in distant regions, wherever the thirst of wealth has introduced the abuse of power, the nations ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... expected from him such supererogatory labour. His memory enabled him to accumulate great stores of a desultory and unsystematic knowledge. Somehow he became a fine Latin scholar, though never first-rate as a Grecian. The direction of his studies was partly determined by the discovery of a folio of Petrarch, lying on a shelf where he was looking for apples; and one of his earliest literary plans, never carried out, was an edition of Politian, with a history of Latin poetry from the time of Petrarch. When he went to the University at the end of this period, he was in possession of ...
— Samuel Johnson • Leslie Stephen
... at the Temple of Apollo. A sweet composition by W. Linton, from Petrarch; "representing the passage of the Choirs across the narrow strait between Delos and Rhenia, by a bridge magnificently decorated with gold and garlands, rich stuffs and tapestry," the splendour of which is enhanced by the brightness of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... ancient Tuscan city, 38 m. SE. of Florence, and eventually subject to it; the birthplace of Maecenas, Michael Angelo, Petrarch, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... my hands a manuscript of Petrarch, but, like a true Goth, I threw it aside, saying it was nothing to me. The fact was, I had a certain spite against the aforesaid Petrarch; for having met with a copy of his works some years before, when I was a philosopher, I found on opening it at various ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... on in Europe, the period was gradually approaching, when the energies of the human mind were to loosen its shackles, and its independence was ultimately to extinguish those delusions and that superstition which had so long enslaved it. Petrarch, born in the year 1304, was deeply impregnated with a passion for classical lore, was smitten with the love of republican institutions, and especially distinguished himself for an adoration of Homer. Dante, a more sublime and original genius ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... Central Italy, entertaining auditors of all classes and ages with stories derived from every attainable source. But the first great epic poet in Italy was Dante (1265-1321), whose Divina Commedia, begun in 1300, is treated separately in this volume. Although Petrarch was prouder of his Latin than of his Italian verses, he too greatly perfected Italian poetry, thus enabling his personal friend Boccaccio to handle the language with lasting success in the tales which compose his Decameron. These are the Italian ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... offered Michael Angelo a home was delighted with his young friend. He found him keenly interested in Dante and Petrarch, and equally gifted as a sculptor and painter. He gave him work to do in the Church of San Petronio, and Michael did so well there that the artists of Bologna grew jealous of him, and at the end of the year forced him to leave ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... saying that in every love affair there is one person who adores while the other allows himself to be adored, and that saying may, with equal justice, be applied to the many literary and artistic friendships of which, pace the elder D'Israeli, history knows so many examples. Petrarch and Boccaccio, Schiller and Goethe, Byron and Shelley immediately occur to the mind in such a connection; but in none of these is the mutual position of giver and receiver of worshipper and worshipped so distinctly marked as in the case ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 1 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... Michael Angelo's name, feeling that no orthographical accuracy can outweigh the associations implied in that familiar title. Michael Angelo has a place among the highest with Homer and Titian, with Virgil and Petrarch, with Raphael and Paul; nor do I imagine that any alteration for the better would be effected by substituting for these time-honoured names Homeros and Tiziano, Vergilius and ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... bodies (a solar system at least with comets) that hung up in his room as a substitute. He had little reverence for the petrefactions of Monte Bolca I perceived, which he considered as mere lufus naturae. He shewed me poor Petrarch's tomb from his observatory, bid me look on Sir Isaac's full-length picture in the room, and said, the world would see no more such men. Of our Maskelyne, however, no man could speak with more esteem, or expressions of generous friendship. His sitting chamber was a pleasant one; and I should ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... vented his anger upon them, drove them from Rome, destroyed their houses, levelled Palestrina to the ground, and ploughed up the land where it had stood. The six brothers of the house were exiles and wanderers. Old Stephen, the idol of Petrarch, alone and wretched, was surrounded by highwaymen, who asked who he was. 'Stephen Colonna,' he answered, 'a Roman citizen.' And the thieves fell back at the sound of the great name. Again, someone asked him with a sneer where all his strongholds were, since Palestrina ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... from the fathers with the promptness of a bishop. She was so strictly orthodox that, on being compelled by stress of weather to land in England, she declined all communication with Queen Elizabeth, on account of her heresy. She was so eminently chaste that she could neither read the sonnets of Petrarch, nor lean on the arm of a gentleman. Her delicacy upon such points was, indeed, carried to such excess, that upon one occasion when the ship which was bringing her to the Netherlands was discovered to be burning, she rebuked a rude fellow who came forward to save her life, assuring him that ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... second "the tales and metrical romances common for the most part to England, Germany, and the north of France; and English songs and ballads continued to the reign of Charles I." In the third the lecturer proposed to deal with the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser, of Petrarch, and of Ariosto, Pulci, and Boiardo. The fourth, fifth, and sixth were to be devoted to the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and to comprise the substance of Coleridge's former courses on the same subject, "enlarged ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... of Petrarch, beginning "Spirto gentil," is supposed, by Voltaire and others, to have been addressed to Rienzi; but there is much more evidence of its having been written, as Ginguene asserts, to the young Stephen Colonna, on his being created a Senator ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... spot. He had heard the story of Laura, and recollected many particulars of it; but still he had not been at the pains to have the spot cleared, and the tomb exposed to view. To any one who was acquainted with the story of Petrarch, or who had perused his impassioned effusions, the dilapidation of this church, and the barbarous concealment of Laura's tomb, were most mortifying circumstances. But, neither the memory of Laura, nor of the brave Crillon, whose tomb is also here, had any effect in averting ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... this time, believe me, he had no thought of harm or wrong; he never dreamed of being in love with Lady Amelie. What was she to him? His queen, his lode-star, his inspiration to all that was great and glorious, the Lama to his Petrarch; but of anything less exalted, he had no notion. Basil Carruthers, with all his eccentricity, would have shuddered at the bare notion of dishonorable love or sin. He was an enthusiast, a dreamer, a poet in heart and soul, but ...
— The Coquette's Victim • Charlotte M. Braeme
... only to those who have some original strength of imagination or will, and with them it cannot go wrong. But a definite ideal, and the terms of its definition, may belong to any one and be turned to any use. So the ideal of Petrarch was formulated and abused by the Petrarchists. The formula of Amadis of Gaul is derived from generations of older unformulated heroes, and implies the exhaustion of the heroic strain, in that line of descent. The Sagas have not come as far as that, but the latter days, that ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... of Mazzini, I always remember Petrarch's invocation to Rienzi. Mazzini comes at a riper period in the world's history, with the same energy of soul, but of purer temper and more enlarged ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... the Inferno below the two latter portions of the Divina Commedia; there was nothing even to revolt his taste, but rather much to attract it, in the scholastic theology and mystic visions of the Paradiso. Petrarch he greatly admired, though with less idolatry than Dante; and the sonnets here printed will show to all competent judges how fully he had imbibed the spirit, without servile centonism, of the best writers in that style of composition who ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... better because they are in love, but they are greater, bolder, brighter, more daring in danger, and more ready in every emergency. So wonder-working is the real passion that even in the base mockery of Love men have risen to genius. Look what it made Petrarch, and I might say Byron too, though he never loved worthy of ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... When Homer . . . despis'd. The editor of the 1873 edition of Chapman's Plays points out that "these twelve lines headed Of great men appear, with a few unimportant verbal differences, among the Epigrams printed at the end of Chapman's Petrarch in 1612." ...
— Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois • George Chapman
... fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in England the term rhetoric and its related words regularly connoted skill in diction. A rhetor was one who was a master of style.[122] Henryson, for instance, calls rhetoric sweet, and Dunbar, ornate.[123] Chaucer admired Petrarch for his "rethorike sweete" which illumined the poetry of Italy,[124] and was himself in turn loved by Lydgate as the "nobler rethor poete of brytagne,"[125] who is called "floure of rethoryk in Englisshe ...
— Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance - A Study of Rhetorical Terms in English Renaissance Literary Criticism • Donald Lemen Clark
... literature, that poets may always be lovers, though I cannot say that I desire lovers should always be poets. But, Mr. Hervey, you must never marry, remember," continued Dr. X——, "never—for your true poet must always be miserable. You know Petrarch tells us, he would not have been happy if he could; he would not have married his mistress if it had been in his power; because then there would have been an end of his ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... always found plenty of friends. Her feline grace and softness has inspired some of the greatest, and, from Tasso and Petrarch down, her quiet and dignified demeanor have been celebrated in verse. Mr. Swinburne, within a few years, has written a charming poem which was published in the Athenaeum, and which places the writer among the select inner circle of true cat-lovers. ...
— Concerning Cats - My Own and Some Others • Helen M. Winslow
... with a full stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square before the church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time—open to the skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within hearing of the vocal stream—is Petrarch's sepulchre. Fit resting-place for what remains to earth of such a poet's clay! It is as though archangels, flying, had carried the marble chest and set it down here on the hill-side, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men. A simple rectilinear ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... is no bathos: it is given simply because Chaucer translated (using the term in its best and highest sense) into his pure, simple and strong English tongue with all its linguistic peculiarities, the thoughts and fancies of his foreign models, the very letter and spirit of Petrarch ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... devoted servants, remembering that in the time of our youth, we were friends, going daily to study the rudiments of grammar, under the excellent instruction of the venerable brother of St. Mark, Friar Georgio Antonio Vespucci, my uncle, whose counsels would to God I had followed! for then, as Petrarch says, I should have been a different man from ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... Wordsworth was sincere and profound. He thoroughly appreciated William Blake. One of the best copies of the 'Songs of Innocence and Experience' that is now in existence was wrought specially for him. He loved Alain Chartier, and Ronsard, and the Elizabethan dramatists, and Chaucer and Chapman, and Petrarch. And to him all the arts were one. 'Our critics,' he remarks with much wisdom, 'seem hardly aware of the identity of the primal seeds of poetry and painting, nor that any true advancement in the ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... Did Petrarch ever think if Laura would make a good wife; did Oswald ever think it of Corinne? Nay, did even the more practical Waverley ever think it of the impassioned Flora? Would it not weaken faith in their romantic passages, if you believed it? What have such ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... stupendous and horrible farce enacted in the Piazza Gran Duca. There was no lack of self-esteem either in the man or his head. Without it, he would scarcely have thought so highly of his rather washy scheme for reorganizing the democratic government, and so very humbly of the genius of Dante, Petrarch, and others, whose works he condemned to the flames. A fraternal regard, too, for such great artists as Fra Angelico and Fra Bartolommeo,—both members of his own convent, and the latter a personal friend,—might ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... pure desire and delight of the eyes, which are the prerogative of the poet,—Emma Lazarus was a poet. The beauty of the world,—what a rapture and intoxication it is, and how it bursts upon her in the very land of beauty, "where Dante and Petrarch trod!" A magic glow colours it all; no mere blues and greens anymore, but a splendor of purple and scarlet and emerald; "each tower, castle, and village shining like a jewel; the olive, the fig, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... and structure are Italian in origin, "sonetto" being the diminutive of "suono," sound. Dante and Petrarch knew it as a special lyric form intended for musical accompaniment. It must have fourteen lines, neither more nor less, with five beats or "stresses" to the line. Each line must end with a rhyme. ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... to one another in the old Burgundy, and Trombin proposed the health of the bride, repeating in her honour one of Petrarch's sonnets in praise of Laura. He said that as he had never seen her he could only compare her beauty to that of the angels, and her virtues to those of the blessed saints, whom he had not seen either, ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... poetical tributes with ornamental borders were posted in public places as a method of doing homage. In this case the unknown "Reverend Don So-and-so" is ranked by his admirer with Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, the greatest Italian poets; with St. Jerome, one of the most celebrated Fathers of the Latin Church; with Cicero, one of the greatest of Roman orators; and with St. Paul, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... the number of such popes as loved fuddling, all those who sat at Avignon; for if we believe Petrarch[2], the long residence that the court of Rome made at Avignon, was only to taste the good French wines; and that it was merely on that account they stayed so long in Provence, and ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... myself two gardens," says Petrarch, "and I do not imagine that they are to be equalled in all the world. I should feel myself inclined to be angry with fortune if there were any so beautiful out of Italy." "I wish," says poor Kirke White writing to a friend, "I wish you to have a taste of these (rural) pleasures ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... at Avignon, in 1338, Simone removed to that city. Here he became the friend of Petrarch and of Laura, and has been praised by this poet as Giotto was ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture - Painting • Clara Erskine Clement
... of countless human lives prolonged through inarticulate generations, finding utterance at last in it. It is deficient in that particular intonation which makes a Shelley's voice differ from a Leopardi's, Petrarch's sonnets for Laura differ from Sidney's sonnets for Stella. It has always less of perceptible artistic effect, more enduring human quality. Some few of its lines are so well found, so rightly said, that they possess ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... peace inhabit with us—avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.—PETRARCH. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... little Morgue! 10 The dead-house where you show your drowned: Petrarch's Vaucluse deg. makes proud the Sorgue, deg. deg.12 Your Morgue has made the Seine renowned. One pays one's debt deg. in such a case; deg.14 I plucked up heart and entered,—stalked, Keeping a tolerable face Compared with some ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... acknowledged it or no, or indeed whether [says Mr. Gosse] the fact has ever been observed, I know not, but the true analogy of the Odes is with the Italian lyric of the early Renaissance. It is in the writings of Petrarch and Dante, and especially in the Canzoniere of the former, that we must look for examples of the source of ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... to our great disgust that it rained heavily. Our hotel was close to the river Arno, the river of Dante and Petrarch. It looked sandy and muddy as it flowed rapidly by. There were several gondola-like barges being towed by ropes on the other side, and Shelley's lines occurred to my memory, more in association of ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... dangerous to a preacher; for he who says one day, "Go to, let me seem to be pathetic," may be nearer than he thinks to saying, "Go to, let me seem to be virtuous, or earnest, or under sorrow for sin." Depend upon it, Sappho loved her verses more sincerely than she did Phaon, and Petrarch his sonnets better than Laura, who was indeed but his poetical stalking-horse. After you shall have once heard that muffled rattle of clods on the coffin-lid of an irreparable loss, you will grow acquainted with a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... nature then that has given rise to supernatural ideas that have "no correspondence with true sight," or, as Holbach expressed it, have no counterpart in the external object. In other words, theology, or poetry about God, as Petrarch said, is ignorance of natural causes reduced ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... piano compositions opus 11 is a "Valse Brillante," warm and melodious. Opus 13 is a "Sonnet," based, after the plan of Liszt, upon a lyric of Petrarch's, a beautiful translation from his "Gli occhi di ch'io parlai si caldamente." It is full of passion, and shows a fine variety in the handling of persistent repetition. Opus 18 couples two sonatinas. The second has the more merit, but both, like most sonatinas, are too ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... yet affectionate tributes to three of the most illustrious names in literature and art: DANTE, and PETRARCH, the celebrated Italian poets; and CANOVA, whose labours have all the freshness and finish of yesterday's chisel. Lord Byron, whose enthusiasm breathes and lives in words that "can never die," has enshrined these memorials in the masterpiece of his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... who profess to find "their only books in woman's looks." Perhaps it might be from the over-tenderness and clemency of Miss Jemima's nature; perhaps it might be that, as yet, she had only experienced the villany of man born and reared in those cold northern climates; and in the land of Petrarch and Romeo, of the citron and myrtle, there was reason to expect that the native monster would be more amenable to gentle influences, less obstinately hardened in his iniquities. Without entering farther into ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... interleaved crib; but more often letting the volume repose by me on the grass and crushed mint of the cool yard under the fig tree, while the last belated cicala sawed, and the wild bees hummed in the ivy flower of the old villa wall. For once you know the spirit of a book, there is a process (known to Petrarch with reference to Homer, whom he was unable to understand) of taking in its charm by merely turning over the pages, or even, as I say, in carrying it about. The literary essence, which is uncommonly ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... even though they might be from the hands of a Rubens or a Tintoret. In literature, is Beranger less a great poet, because he has condensed his thoughts within the narrow limits of his songs? Does not Petrarch owe his fame to his Sonnets? and among those who most frequently repeat their soothing rhymes, how many know any thing of the existence of his long poem on Africa? We cannot doubt that the prejudice which ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... amorous ditties owes, I believe, its original to the fame of Petrarch, who, in an age rude and uncultivated, by his tuneful homage to his Laura, refined the manners of the lettered world, and filled Europe with love and poetry. But the basis of all excellence is truth: he that professes ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... us is whether Aristophanes really liked AEschylus or only pretended to do so. It must be remembered that the claims of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, to the foremost place amongst tragedians were held to be as incontrovertible as those of Dante, Petrarch, Tasso and Ariosto to be the greatest of Italian poets, are held among the Italians of to-day. If we can fancy some witty, genial writer, we will say in Florence, finding himself bored by all the ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... sweet-eyed Tuscan wove The gilded thread of her romance, (Which I have lost by grievous chance,) The one dear woman that I love, Beside me in our seaside nook, Closed a white finger in her book, Half-vexed that she should read, and weep For Petrarch, to a man asleep. And scorning me, so tame and cold, She rose, and wandered down the shore, Her wine-dark drapery, fold in fold, Imprisoned by an ivory hand; And on a ridge of granite, half in sand, She ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... notable are four stanzas on Venice (including stanza xiii. on "The Horses of St. Mark"); "The sunset on the Brenta" (stanzas xxvii.-xxix.); The tombs in Santa Croce,—the apostrophe to "the all Etruscan three," Petrarch, Dante, Boccaccio (stanzas liv.-lx.); "Rome a chaos of ruins—antiquarian ignorance" (stanzas lxxx.-lxxxii.); "The nothingness of Man—the hope of the future—Freedom" (stanzas xciii.-xcviii.); "The ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... celebrated in the Shepheards Calender under the name of Rosalind, "the widow's daughter of the glen." A rival, Menalchas, was more successful in finding favor with his fair neighbor. Although he had before this turned his attention to poetry by translating the sonnets of Petrarch and Du Bellay (published in 1569), it was while here in the North country that he first showed his high poetic ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... of Cornelius Agrippa, where he is spoken of among the authors of lascivious stories: "There have been many of these historical pandars, of which some of obscure fame, as Aeneas Sylvius, Dantes, and Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus," etc.[51] The first German translation was that of Kannegiesser (1809). Versions by Streckfuss, Kopisch, and Prince John (late king) of Saxony followed. Goethe seems never to have given that attention to Dante which his ever-alert ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Petrarch to stand for a poet, not thinking what lady's name he suggested; and he was surprised at the severity of Philip's tone as he inquired, 'Do you mean anything, ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the following remarks to Madame Hanska: "I have never seen a novel in which happy love, satisfied love, is depicted. Rousseau puts too much rhetoric in his attempt, and Richardson too much preaching. The poets have too many flourishes; the novelists are too much the slaves of facts. Petrarch is too exclusively occupied with his images of speech and his concetti; he sees the poetry more than the woman. Pope has given perhaps too many regrets to Heloise; he wanted her to be better than nature; and the better is an enemy to the good. In fine, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... P: Which of your poets? Petrarch, or Tasso, or Dante? Guarini? Ariosto? Aretine? Cieco di Hadria? I have read ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson
... native. But the readers of all nations point at once, and applaud invariably, at the same passage. Who ever rose from the Inferno of Dante without looking back to the story of Ugolino and of Francesca? If a volume of choice extracts were to be culled from the works of Dante, Ariosto, Petrarch, an Englishman and an Italian would make no greater difference in their selection than would two Englishmen ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... company of courtly makers, of whom sir Thomas Wyat the elder and Henry earl of Surry were the two chieftains; who having travelled into Italy, and there tasted the sweet and stately measures and style of the Italian poesy, as novices newly crept out of the schools of Dante, Arioste, and Petrarch, they greatly polished our rude and homely manner of vulgar poesy, from that it had been before, and for that cause may justly be said the first reformers of our English metre ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... England will be selected by my bookseller to add to this collection. One ("Lines written among the Euganean Hills".—Editor.), which I sent from Italy, was written after a day's excursion among those lovely mountains which surround what was once the retreat, and where is now the sepulchre, of Petrarch. If any one is inclined to condemn the insertion of the introductory lines, which image forth the sudden relief of a state of deep despondency by the radiant visions disclosed by the sudden burst ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... pyrotechnical display of madrigals, sufficient to make Benserade, Voiture, and all other dealers in the fireworks of gallantry jealous; and at the end of the dinner, Mademoiselle Laure, having learned that he was a poet, gave him clearly to understand that she was not indisposed to accept him as her Petrarch. She even, without circumlocution, made an appointment with ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... wife—misfortunes incident to the most respectable. Pindar and Virgil were court favorites, repaying their patrons in golden song. Dante, indeed, suffered banishment; but his banishment was just a move in a political (or rather a family) game. Petrarch and Ariosto were not uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived unmolested when the hour of triumph ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... great Florentine and his lady were necessarily of the party. And then I began, as men will, to take the lead. Aurelia had exhausted her little store when she had named Giotto and Dante: I took her further afield. We read the Commentaries of Villani, Malavolti's History of Siena, the Triumphs of Petrarch, his Sonnets (fatal pap for young lovers), the Prince of Machiavelli, the Epics of Pulci and Bojardo, and Ariosto's dangerously honeyed pages. Here Aurelia was content to follow me, and I found teaching her ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... with Dorothea alone, and was impatient of slow circumstance. However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more conversation. Necessity excused stratagem, but stratagem was limited by the dread of offending Dorothea. He found out ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the solitary frailty of her life. And so at every turn! Not a gloomy by-street, not a dilapidated fountain, not a grim old college facade but had its history, or its legend. Here the voice of Abelard thundered new truths, and Rabelais jested, and Petrarch discoursed with the doctors. Here, in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie, walked the shades of Racine, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Voltaire. Dear, venerable, immortal old Quartier Latin! Thy streets were narrow, but they ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards |
