[411] {351} ["He who would seek, as I have done, the last memorials of the life and death of Petrarch in that sequestered Euganean village [Arquà is about twelve miles south-west of Padua], will still find them there. A modest house, apparently of great antiquity, passes for his last habitation. A chair in which he is said to have died is shown there. And if these details are uncertain, there is no doubt that the sarcophagus of red marble, supported on pillars, in the churchyard of Arquà, contains, or once contained, his mortal remains. Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse visited the spot more than sixty years ago in a sceptical frame of mind; for doubts had at that time been thrown on the very existence of Laura; and the varied details of the poet's life, which are preserved with so much fidelity in his correspondence, were almost forgotten."--_Petrarch_, by H. Reeve, 1879, p. 14. In a letter to Hoppner, September 12, 1817, Byron says that he was moved "to turn aside in a second visit to Arquà." Two years later, October, 1819, he in vain persuaded Moore "to spare a day or two to go with me to Arquà. I should like," he said, "to visit that tomb with you--a pair of poetical pilgrims--eh, Tom, what say you?" But "Tom" was for Rome and Lord John Russell, and ever afterwards bewailed the lost opportunity "with wonder and self-reproach" (_Life_, p. 423; _Life_, by Karl Elze, 1872, p. 235).] [mc] {352} _His mansion and his monument_----.--[MS. M., D. erased.] [md] ----_formed his sepulchral fane_.--[MS. M.] [412] [Compare Wordsworth's _Ode_, "Intimations of," etc., xi. lines 9-11-- "The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."] [413] ["Euganeis istis in collibus ... domum parvam sed delectabilem et honestam struxi ... hic quanquam æger corpore, tranquillus animo frater dego, sine tumultibus, sine erroribus, sine curis, legens semper et scribens, Deum laudans."--Petrarca, _Epistolæ Seniles_, xiv. 6 (_Opera_, Basileæ, 1581, p. 938). See, too, the notes to _Arquà_ (Rogers's _Italy: Poems_, 1852, ii. 105-109), which record the pilgrimage of other poets, Boccaccio and Alfieri, to the great laureate's tomb; and compare with Byron's stanzas the whole of that exquisite cameo, delicate and yet durable as if graved on chalcedony.] [me] {353} _Society's the school where taught to live._--[MS. M. erased.] [mf] ----_the soul with God must strive_.--[MS. M. erased.] [414] The struggle is to the full as likely to be with demons as with our better thoughts. Satan chose the wilderness for the temptation of our Saviour. And our unsullied John Locke preferred the presence of a child to complete solitude.