One day he asked her physician how she was, and was told by him that her condition was very dangerous: on that occasion he composed the following sonnet:[E]-- This lovely spirit, if ordain'd to leave Its mortal tenement before its time, Heaven's fairest habitation shall receive And welcome her to breathe its sweetest clime.
If she establish her abode between Mars and the planet-star of Beauty's queen, The sun will be obscured, so dense a cloud Of spirits from adjacent stars will crowd To gaze upon her beauty infinite.
Say that she fixes on a lower sphere, Beneath the glorious sun, her beauty soon Will dim the splendour of inferior stars-- Of Mars, of Venus, Mercury, and the Moon.
She'll choose not Mars, but higher place than Mars; She will eclipse all planetary light, And Jupiter himself will seem less bright.
I trust that I have enough to say in favour of Petrarch to satisfy his rational admirers; but I quote this sonnet as an example of the worst style of Petrarch's poetry.

I make the English reader welcome to rate my power of translating it at the very lowest estimation.

He cannot go much further down than myself in the scale of valuation, especially if he has Italian enough to know that the exquisite mechanical harmony of Petrarch's style is beyond my reach.

It has been alleged that this sonnet shows how much the mind of Petrarch had been influenced by his Platonic studies; but if Plato had written poetry he would never have been so extravagant.
Petrarch, on his return from Germany, had found the old Pope, John XXII., intent on two speculations, to both of which he lent his enthusiastic aid.

One of them was a futile attempt to renew the crusades, from which Europe had reposed for a hundred years.