XXIX.
Filled with the face of heaven, which, from afar,
Comes down upon the waters! all its hues,
From the rich sunset to the rising star,
Their magical variety diffuse:
And now they change—a paler Shadow strews
Its mantle o'er the mountains; parting Day
Dies like the Dolphin, whom each pang imbues
With a new colour as it gasps away—
The last still loveliest, till—'tis gone—and all is gray.
XXX.
There is a tomb in Arqua;—reared in air,
Pillared in their sarcophagus, repose
The bones of Laura's lover: here repair
Many familiar with his well-sung woes,
The Pilgrims of his Genius. He arose
To raise a language, and his land reclaim
From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes:
Watering the tree which bears his Lady's name[1]N8
With his melodious tears, he gave himself to Fame.
- ↑ [The Abbé de Sade, in his Mémoires pour la vie de Pétrarque (1767), affirmed, on the strength of documentary evidence, that the Laura of the sonnets, born de Noves, was the wife of his ancestor, Hugo de Sade, and the mother of a large family. "Gibbon," says Hobhouse (note viii.), "called the abbé's memoirs a 'labour of love' (see Decline and Fall, chap. lxx. note 1), and followed him with confidence and delight;" but the poet James Beattie (in a letter to the Duchess of Gordon, August 17, 1782) disregarded them as a "romance," and, more recently, "an ingenious Scotchman" [Alexander Fraser
