and serious cast, is a circumstance well established; and on this account, the possession of romantic and sequestered scenery is a requisite highly wished for by those who mourn the loss of a beloved object. The gloomy majesty of antique wood, the awful grandeur of o'erhanging rock, the frequent dashing of perturbed water, throw a sombre tint around, which suits the language of complaining grief. Perhaps to the wild and picturesque beauties of Valchiusa we owe much of the poetry, much of the pathos of Petrarch, the perpetuity of whose passion for Laura was, without doubt, greatly strengthened by such a retreat; where, free from interruption, he could dwell upon the remembrance of her virtue and her beauty, could invoke her gentle spirit, and indulge the sorrows of his heart. How strongly its romantic scenery affected him, how vividly it brought to recollection those long-lost pleasures when, in the company of his beloved Laura, he wandered amid its friendly shades, and hung upon the music of her lips, every reader of sensibility will judge from the following beautiful translation of the 261st sonnet, transcribed from an anonymous Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch.-

ON THE PROSPECT OF VALCHIUSA,

Thou lonely vale, where in the fleeting years

Of tender youth I breath'd my am'rous pain;
Thou brook, whose silver stream receiv'd my tears,
Thy imurmurs joining to my sorrowing strain,
I come, to visit all my former haunts again!

O green-clad hills, familiar to my sight!
O well-known paths where oft I wont to rove,
Musing the tender accents of my love!

Long use and sad remembrance now invite,
Again to view the scenes which once could give de-
light.

Yes, ye are still the same-To me alone

Your charms decay; for she, who to these eyes Gave nature beauty, now for ever gone,

Deep in the silent grave a mould'ring victim lies!

Pathetic, almost to pain, must have been the impression on the susceptible mind of Petrarch; and, indeed, on every mind alive to pity and struggling with distress, such scenery will ever produce sensations of a similar kind how delightful to the bosom of sadness, are the still, sweet beauties of a moon-light evening! and who, that has a heart to feel, is not struck by the soft and tender scenery of a Claude, whose

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setting suns diffuse such an exquisite melancholy, and whose shadowy fore-grounds drop' such a grateful gloom, as are peculiarly captivating to the mind of taste and sensibility!

But nothing will better prove how greatly avaricious the soul of Petrarch was of this mingled perception of pleasure and of pain, this luxury of grief, than presenting the reader with a note translated from the margin of a manuscript of Virgil, preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and formerly in Petrarch's possession. It is enriched with many latin annotations in the poet's handwriting, and on the first page is the following interesting passage:

"Laura, illustrious by the virtues she possessed, and celebrated, during many years, by my Verses, appeared to my eyes for the first time, on the sixth day of April, in the year thirteen hundred and twenty-seven, at Avignon, in the church of St. Claire, at six o'clock in the morning. I was then in my early youth. In the same town, on the same day, and at the same hour, in the year thirteen hundred and forty-eight, this light, this sun, withdrew

from the world. I was then at Verona, ignorant of the calamity that had befallen me. A letter I received at Parma, from my Ludovico, on the nineteenth of the following month, brought me the cruel information. Her body, so beautiful, so pure, was deposited on the day of her death, after vespers, in the church of the Cordeliers. Her soul, as Seneca has said. of Africanus, I am confident, returned to heaven, from whence it came.

"For the purpose of often dwelling on the sad remembrance of so severe a loss, I have written these particulars in a book that comes frequently under my inspection. I have thus prepared for myself, a pleasure mingled with pain. My loss ever present to my memory, will teach me, that there is now nothing in this life which can give me pleasure-That it is now time I should renounce the world, since the chain which bound me to it, with so tender an attachment, is broken. Nor will this, with the assistance of Almighty God, be difficult. My mind, turning to the past, will set before me all the superfluous cares that have engaged me; all the deceitful hopes that I have enter

tained, and the unexpected and afflicting consequences of all my projects."

But, independent of a train of thought produced by adverse circumstances, scenery of a stupendous and solitary cast will ever have, upon a person of acute feeling, somewhat of a similar effect; it will dispose to contemplation, it will suggest a wish for seclusion, a romantic and visionary idea of happiness abstracted from society. Those who possess a genius; of which imagination is the strongest characteristic, are of all others the most susceptible of enthusiasm; and, if placed amid scenes of this description, and where civilization has made little progress, they will eventually be the sons of poetry, melancholy, and superstition. To these causes we may ascribe the peculiarities of Ossian, his deep and uninterrupted gloom, his wild but impressive mythology. I do not, indeed, deny, that even in the most polished periods of society much of this cast of mind may be observed; it is ever, I think, attendant upon genius, but, at the same time, so tempered by the sober tints of science and philosophy, that it seldom breaks in upon the province of judgVOL. I. G