The fatal year now began which cast mourning and gloom over the rest of his life. It was a year fatal to the whole world. The plague, which had been extending its ravages over Asia, entered Europe. As if for an omen of the greater calamity, a disastrous earthquake occurred on the 25th of January. Petrarch was timid: he feared thunder--he dreaded the sea; and the alarming concussion of nature that shook Italy filled him with terror. The plague then extended its inroads to increase his alarm. It spread its mortal ravages far and wide: nearly one half of the population of the world became its prey. Petrarch saw thousands die around him, and he trembled for his friends: he heard that it was at Avignon, and his friend Sennucio del Bene had fallen its victim. A thousand sad presentiments haunted his mind. He recollected the altered countenance of Laura when he last saw her; he dreamed of her as dead; her pale image hovered near his couch, bidding him never expect to see her more. At last, the fatal truth reached him: he received intelligence of her death on the 19th of May. By a singular coincidence, she died on the anniversary of the day when he first saw her. She was taken ill on the 3d of April, and languished but three days. As soon as the symptoms of the plague declared themselves, she prepared to die: she made her will, which is dated on the 3d of April[48], and received the sacraments of the church. On the 6th she died, surrounded to the last by her friends and the noble ladies of Avignon, who braved the danger of infection to attend on one so lovely and so beloved. On the evening of the same day on which she died, she was interred in the chapel of the Cross which her husband had lately built in the church of the Minor Friars at Avignon. With her was buried a leaden box, fastened with wire, which enclosed a medal and a sealed parchment, on which was inscribed an Italian sonnet. If the sonnet were the composition of Petrarch, as the sense of it would intimate, although its want of merit renders it doubtful, this box must have been placed in the grave at a subsequent period. The sensitive heart of Petrarch had often dwelt on the possibility of Laura's death. Although she was only three years his junior, he comforted himself by the reflection that as he had entered life first so he should be the first to quit it.[49] This fond hope was disapappointed: he lost her who, for more than twenty years, had continually been the object of all his thoughts: he lost her at a period when he began to hope that, while time diminished the violence of his passion, it might draw them nearer as friends. The sole melancholy consolation now afforded him was derived from the contemplation of the past. That at each hour of the day her memory might be more vividly present to his thoughts, he fixed to the binding of his copy of Virgil a record of her death, written in Latin, of which the following is a translation:--