The drive from Este along the skirts of the Euganean Hills to Arqua
takes one through a country which is tenderly beautiful, because of its
contrast between little peaked mountains and the plain. It is not a
grand landscape. It lacks all that makes the skirts of Alps and
Apennines sublime. Its charm is a certain mystery and repose--an
undefined sense of the neighboring Adriatic, a pervading consciousness
of Venice unseen but felt from far away. From the terraces of Arqua the
eye ranges across olive-trees, laurels, and pomegranates on the southern
slopes to the misty level land that melts into the sea, with churches
and tall campanili like gigantic galleys setting sail for fairyland over
"the foam of perilous seas forlorn." Let a blue-black shadow from a
thunder-cloud be cast upon this plain, and let one ray of sunlight
strike a solitary bell-tower: it burns with palest flame of rose against
the steely dark, and in its slender shaft and shell-like tint of pink
all Venice is foreseen.
The village church of Arqua stands upon one of these terraces, with a
full stream of clearest water flowing by. On the little square before
the church-door, where the peasants congregate at mass-time--open to the
skies with all their stars and storms, girdled by the hills, and within
hearing of the vocal stream--is Petrarch's sepulchre. Fit resting-place
for what remains to earth of such a poet's clay! It is as though
archangels, flying, had carried the marble chest and set it down here on
the hill-side, to be a sign and sanctuary for after-men. A simple
rectilinear coffin, of smooth Verona _mandorlato_, raised on four thick
columns, and closed by a heavy cippus-cover. Without emblems,
allegories, or lamenting genii, this tomb of the great poet, the great
awakener of Europe from mental lethargy, encircled by the hills beneath
the canopy of heaven, is impressive beyond the power of words. Bending
here, we feel that Petrarch's own winged thoughts and fancies, eternal
and aerial, "forms more real than living man, nurslings of immortality,"
have congregated to be the ever-ministering and irremovable attendants
on the shrine of one who, while he lived, was purest spirit in a veil of
flesh.