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 neighbouring 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 hillside, 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 aërial, '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.