disposition, vivacious and engaging manners, and an attractive exterior; we cannot wonder that Petrarch was the darling of his age, the associate of its greatest men, and the man whom princes delighted to honour. Hitherto the feelings of friendship had engrossed him: love had not yet robbed him of sleep, nor dimmed his eyes with tears; and he wondered to behold such weakness in others.[29] Now at the age of twenty-three, after the fire of mere boyhood had evaporated, he felt the power of a violent and inextinguishable passion. [Sidenote:1327. Ætat. 23.] At six in the morning, on the 6th of April, A. D. 1327 (he often fondly records the exact year, day, and hour), on occasion of the festival of Easter, he visited the church of Sainte Claire at Avignon, and beheld, for the first time, Laura de Sâde. She was just twenty years of age, and in the bloom of beauty,--a beauty so touching and heavenly, so irradiated by purity and smiling innocence, and so adorned by gentleness and modesty, that the first sight stamped the image in the poet's heart, never hereafter to be erased. Laura was the daughter of Audibert de Noves, a noble and a knight: she lost her father in her early youth; and at the age of seventeen, her mother married her to Hugh de Sâde, a young noble only a few years older than his bride. She was distinguished by her rank and fortune, but more by her loveliness, her sweetness, and the untainted purity of her life and manners in the midst of a society noted for its licentiousness.[30] Now she is known as the subject of Petrarch's verses; as the woman who inspired an immortal passion, and, kindling into living fire the dormant sensibility of the poet, gave origin to the most beautiful and refined, the most passionate, and yet the most delicate, amatory poetry that exists in the world. Petrarch beheld the loveliness and sweetness of the young beauty, and was transfixed. He sought acquaintance with her; and while the manners of the times prevented his entering her house[31], he enjoyed many opportunities of meeting her in society, and of conversing with her. He would have declared his love, but her reserve enforced silence. "She opened my breast," he writes, "and took my heart into her hand, saying, 'Speak no word of this.'" Yet the reverence inspired by her modesty and dignity was not always sufficient to restrain her lover: being alone with her, and she appearing more gracious than usual, Petrarch, on one occasion, tremblingly and fearfully confessed his passion, but she, with altered looks, replied, "I am not the person you take me for!" Her displeasure froze the very heart of the poet, so that he fled from her presence in grief and dismay.[32]