beforehand, perhaps because they feel little security in it afterwards.

The elevation to the papacy of the cheerful and indulgent son of Lorenzo
de' Medici, after the troublous reign of Julius, was hailed with delight
by all Christendom, and nowhere more so than in the pope's native place,
Florence. Ariosto went there to see the spectacles; and there, in the
midst of them, he found himself robbed of his heart by the lady whom he
afterwards married. Her name was Alessandra Benucci. She was the widow of
one of the Strozzi family, whom he had known in Ferrara, and he had long
admired her. The poet, who, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, has recorded the
day on which he fell in love, which was that of St. John the Baptist (the
showy saint-days of the south offer special temptations to that effect),
dwells with minute fondness on the particulars of the lady's appearance.
Her dress was black silk, embroidered with two grape-bearing vines
intertwisted; and "between her serene forehead and the path that went
dividing in two her rich and golden tresses," was a sprig of laurel in
bud. Her observer, probably her welcome if not yet accepted lover, beheld
something very significant in this attire; and a mysterious poem, in
which he records a device of a black pen feathered with gold, which he
wore embroidered on a gown of his own, has been supposed to allude to it.
As every body is tempted to make his guess on such occasions, I take the
pen to have been the black-haired poet himself, and the golden feather
the tresses of the lady. Beautiful as he describes her, with a face full
of sweetness, and manners noble and engaging, he speaks most of the
charms of her golden locks. The black gown could hardly have implied her
widowhood: the allusion would not have been delicate. The vine belongs to
dramatic poets, among whom the lover was at that time to be classed, the
_Orlando_ not having appeared. Its duplification intimated another self;
and the crowning laurel was the success that awaited the heroic poet and
the conqueror of the lady's heart.[14]