been founded on truth, else never could it have stood the test of five centuries, and never would it have assimilated itself, as it has done, with the poetic speech of an entire race. I know of hardly an English poet in whose rhymes in the matter of love, and particularly among those of a narrower range of thought and a lower plane of vision, one cannot trace in a greater or less degree the influence of Petrarch. Thus, to me, Petrarch remains the very king of spring-time poets. There are summer poets, autumn poets and winter poets, but Petrarch was none of these. Neither his passion nor his poetry ever ripened into summer or faded into autumn. He will always typify the early youth of love and song. I can never open his book of sonnets that I do not hear the rustle of young winds in green boughs, and do not catch the faint sweet odor of violets and primroses--the violets and primroses that grow on the banks of the Sorgue in the Vaucluse--the violets and primroses that Laura wore in her hair when Petrarch saw her kneeling in the church of Santa Chiara in Avignon, and loved her all at once. The bright little river Sorgue is here a rushing brook, tumbling and foaming over the great stones in its bed, and imprisoned between two green sloping banks covered with low trees and bushes and tendrils of creeping ivy. It finds birth, this merry, roaring brook, in a dark, mysterious, shadowy pool, overhung by wild fantastic masses of rock, which loses itself far back in a dim cavern beneath the cliffs. Black and motionless, sullen and inscrutable, it lies, this source of the river Sorgue, a very pool of Lethe, looking as though it knew it drew its sustenance from the deepest heart of the earth, held communication with the hidden powers of Nature, and was one at the core with all the mighty waters of the creation. What a type of the poet's own genius--nourished deep down under the ground in the universal soul of humanity, fed by the elements that centuries of solution have infused into the hidden springs of the intellect, one in thought with all the great minds that have watered the arid fields of lower human intelligence, profound, unsearchable as the earth itself! And yet when it rises to the surface of the world it becomes only a sunny, murmuring river, which dances along among green banks and bushes; and, being noticed by the careless passer-by, who cannot see the deep infinity of waters of which it is the symbol, and knows not even whether they exist, is termed "a pretty stream of thought and fancy, but one that hath no profundity nor seriousness."