But I felt that these harsh distorted outlines had naught in common with Petrarch's Laura. For she had golden hair that floated loose in the breeze and was the prison of enchained and captive Love, and she had roses, red and white, upon her face, and a throat of snowy purity, and a smile of such rare gentleness that when she passed them by men said, "Sure this is an angel come from heaven!" That is the Laura who for centuries has beamed upon humanity--a sweet, benign, refreshing presence--from within her lover's sonnets. That is the Laura in whose reality I believe, but the Laura who lies imprisoned and disguised behind the grotesque mask of mediaeval art I cannot, will not, recognize. In Petrarch's utterance I find Laura, a pure spiritual shape in mind and body and soul; but in her portrait I see only Laura clogged and choked and bound about with the trammels of early art and the weight of crude, untruthful detail. Thus, I believe that art at its best is but a dull, material, mechanical means for the translation or reproduction of thought and Nature, and that for the swift, living, electric flame of truth we must refer in all ages and climes to speech pure and simple--the speech of the poet. There are many who doubt that the words in which Petrarch clothed his love for Laura were words of sincerity and truth, and who blame his fatal tendency to utilize every incident and feeling connected with her. Unquestionably, there was a strong element of earthliness, a dilution of the pure essence of his affection, in much that Petrarch wrote. It could hardly have chanced otherwise with a man into whose life worldly intercourse entered so largely. There must have been times when the pure light of revelation was hidden from him, and he unknowingly supplied its place with fancies of a lower kind. His experiences as he met them one by one were, I doubt not, faithfully and sincerely treated, but after they had fallen into the past he was enabled to view them by the cold strong light of the intellect, and the instincts of his nature led him to incorporate them in verse. It has always been a concomitant of the poetic character, except perhaps in those lofty organizations whose utterances are revelations, to regard its own personality objectively and treat it as material for expression in speech. The very word-crystallization that a thought or sentiment, however full of inspiration, must needs undergo to make it palpable, denotes an amount of conscious effort which detracts in a measure from its apparent spontaneity. But in spite of the quaint conceits, the frequent play upon words, the unworthy tricks of speech, the painful sacrifice to rhyme which occasionally mar his verse, I believe Petrarch was sincere. If he was only a pretence and a sham, then all the amatory poetry that has been written since his time, intellectual or analytic, passionate or sensuous, is a pretence and a sham. Petrarch's utterance must needs have