But the unmistakable proofs of a deepening effect of nature on the human spirit begin with Dante. Not only does he awaken in us by a few vigorous lines the sense of the morning airs and the trembling light on the distant ocean, or of the grandeur of the storm-beaten forest, but he makes the ascent of lofty peaks, with the only possible object of enjoying the view[684]--the first man, perhaps, since the days of antiquity who did so. In Boccaccio we can do little more than infer how country scenery affected him;[685] yet his pastoral romances show his imagination to have been filled with it. But the significance of nature for a receptive spirit is fully and clearly displayed by Petrarch--one of the first truly modern men. That clear soul--who first collected from the literature of all countries evidence of the origin and progress of the sense of natural beauty, and himself, in his ‘Ansichten der Natur,’ achieved the noblest masterpiece of description--Alexander von Humboldt, has not done full justice to Petrarch; and, following in the steps of the great reaper, we may still hope to glean a few ears of interest and value. Petrarch was not only a distinguished geographer--the first map of Italy is said to have been drawn by his direction[686]--and not only a reproducer of the sayings of the ancients,[687] but felt himself the influence of natural beauty. The enjoyment of nature is, for him, the favourite accompaniment of intellectual pursuits; it was to combine the two that he lived in learned retirement at Vaucluse and elsewhere, that he from time to time fled from the world and from his age.[688] We should do him wrong by inferring from his weak and undeveloped power of describing natural scenery that he did not feel it deeply. His picture, for instance, of the lovely Gulf of Spezzia and Porto Venere, which he inserts at the end of the sixth book of the ‘Africa,’ for the reason that none of the ancients or moderns had sung of it,[689] is no more than a simple enumeration, but the descriptions in letters to his friends of Rome, Naples, and other Italian cities in which he willingly lingered, are picturesque and worthy of the subject. Petrarch is also conscious of the beauty of rock scenery, and is perfectly able to distinguish the picturesqueness from the utility of nature.[690] During his stay among the woods of Reggio, the sudden sight of an impressive landscape so affected him that he resumed a poem which he had long laid aside.[691] But the deepest impression of all was made upon him by the ascent of Mont Ventoux, near Avignon.[692] An indefinable longing for a distant panorama grew stronger and stronger in him, till at length the accidental sight of a passage in Livy, where King Philip, the enemy of Rome, ascends the Hæmus, decided him. He thought that what was not blamed in a grey-headed monarch, might be well _excused_ in a young man of private station. The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was