"Laura, illustrious through her own virtues, and long celebrated by my verses, first appeared to me in my youth, in the year of our Lord 1327, on the sixth day of April, in the church of Ste. Claire, at Avignon, at the ninth hour[50] of the morning. And in the same city, during the same month of April, on the same day of the month, and at the same early hour, but in the year 1348, this light was withdrawn from the world; while I, alas! ignorant of my fate, chanced to be at Verona. The unhappy intelligence reached me through the letters of my friend Louis, at Parma, in the same year, on the morning of the nineteenth of May. Her chaste and beautiful body was deposited, on the evening of her death in the church of the Minor Friars at Avignon.[51] Her soul, as Seneca says of Africanus, I believe to have returned to the heaven whence it came. To mingle some sweetness with the bitter memory of this miserable event, I have selected this place to record it, which often meets my eyes; so that by frequent view of these words, and by due estimation of the swift passage of time, I may be reminded that nothing henceforth can please me in life, and that, my chief tie being broken, it is time that I should escape from this Babylon; and, by the grace of God, I shall find this easy, while I resolutely and boldly reflect on the vain cares of years gone by, on my futile hopes, and on their unexpected downfall."[52] Death consecrates and deepens the sentiment with which we regard a beloved object; it is no wonder, therefore, that Petrarch, whose sensibility and warmth of feeling surpassed that of all other men, should have gone beyond himself in the poems he wrote subsequent to Laura's death. Nothing can be more tender, more instinct with the spirit of passionate melancholy, and, at the same time, more beautiful, than the sonnets and canzoni which lament her loss. It was his only consolation to recur to all the marks of affection he had ever received from her, and to believe that she regarded him with tender interest from her place of bliss in heaven. He indulged, also, in another truly catholic mode of testifying his affection, by giving large sums in charity for the sake of her soul, and causing so many masses to be said for the same purpose, that, as a priest who was his contemporary, informed his congregation, in a sermon, "they had been sufficient to withdraw her from the hands of the devil, had she been the worst woman in the world; while, on the contrary, her death was holy."[53]