Petrarch was twenty-three years old in 1327 when he met Laura. She died twenty-one years later. Petrarch survived her twenty-six years, dying in 1374. Petrarch, it should be mentioned, had two illegitimate children born by a mistress before Laura's death; they were later legitimised. The poet probably at times felt the pangs of disprised love to the extent that he claims he did in his sonnets; he may have experienced the grief he describes he suffered in his sonnets. But that he was in the constant throes of love for her for forty-seven years is doubtful. He probably was projecting that ideal of faithful love to please the public; he offered himself as the type of hero the public likes; a faithful, steadfast lover. It was this kind of ideal that made so great a genius like Thomas Hardy gratify the public taste by portraying so unswerving a lover as Gabriel Oak in _Far From the Madding Crowd_. The case of Dante is an even more noteworthy example of literary affectation and self-delusion. His love is the most astonishing in history. He and Beatrice were each only nine years old when he saw her. He probably saw her once after that. She died in 1290, when the poet was twenty-five years old. Great as Dante's sorrow was, it did not prevent him from marrying two years later. Dante makes Beatrice the heroine of his _Divine Comedy_, or at least of the Paradiso. His platonic affection for her is so unnatural that one feels he was doing what Petrarch did, unconsciously creating an ideal and depicting as permanent an emotion, that had really brief sway. Although it is true that their past love affairs may have ruled them for life, neither Dante nor Petrarch were the faithful lovers they would have us believe they were. CHAPTER III DREAMS AND LITERATURE I Freud discovered that dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, in that they portrayed our most daring and immoral wishes as actually fulfilled. It is not necessary that we actually have those wishes in our waking life; it is sufficient if they merely intruded themselves upon us against our wills sometime in the past. The dream will express our inmost thoughts. It will use symbolical language to let us still remain in the dark about our painful desires; but the psychoanalyst can learn what these are. As a result, when we have revealed to us what unconscious emotions are at the bottom of our nervous disturbances, we may be eased of them. Many writers on dreams, in the past, understood that they referred to events of our daily life, but the exact relation was not seen. The ancients were especially interested in the phenomena of dreams. Many ancient histories and fairy tales abound in narrations and interpretations of dreams. Modern literary men also have paid a great deal of attention to them. There are essays on dreams by Locke, Hobbes, Thomas Browne, Addison, Leigh Hunt, Dickens, Emerson and Lafcadio Hearn.