He praises woodland solitude: 

  Dear happy groves! 
  And them all silent, solitary gloom,
  True residence of peace and of repose! 
  How willingly, how willingly my steps
  To you return, and oh! if but my stars
  Benightly had decreed
  My life for solitude, and as my wish
  Would naturally prompt to pass my days—­
  No, not the Elysian fields,
  Those happy gardens of the demi-gods,
  Would I exchange for yon enchanting shades.

The love lyrics of the later Renaissance are remarkably rich in vivid pictures of Nature combined with much personal sentiment.  Petrarch’s are the model; he inspired Vittoria Colonna, and she too revelled in sad feelings and memories, especially about the death of her husband:[12]

’When I see the earth adorned and beautiful with a thousand lovely and sweet flowers, and how in the heavens every star is resplendent with varied colours; when I see that every solitary and lively creature is moved by natural instinct to come out of the forests and ancient caverns to seek its fellow by day and by night; and when I see the plains adorned again with glorious flowers and new leaves, and hear every babbling brook with grateful murmurs bathing its flowery banks, so that Nature, in love with herself, delights to gaze on the beauty of her works, I say to myself, reflecting:  “How brief is this our miserable mortal life!” Yesterday this plain was covered with snow, to-day it is green and flowery.  And again in a moment the beauty of the heavens is overclouded by a fierce wind, and the happy loving creatures remain hidden amidst the mountains and the woods; nor can the sweet songs of the tender plants and happy birds be heard, for these cruel storms have dried up the flowers on the ground; the birds are mute, the most rapid streams and smallest rivulets are checked by frost, and what was one hour so beautiful and joyous, is, for a season, miserable and dead.’

Here the two pictures in the inner and outer life are equally vivid to the poetess; it is the real ‘pleasure of sorrow,’ and she lingers over them with delight.

Bojardo, too, reminds us of Petrarch; for example, in Sonnet 89:[13]

  Thou shady wood, inured my griefs to hear,
  So oft expressed in quick and broken sighs;
  Thou glorious sun, unused to set or rise
  But as the witness of my daily fear;

  Ye wandering birds, ye flocks and ranging deer,
  Exempt from my consuming agonies;
  Thou sunny stream to whom my sorrow flies
  ’Mid savage rocks and wilds, no human traces near.

  O witnesses eternal, how I live! 
  My sufferings hear, and win to their relief
  That scornful beauty—­tell her how I grieve!

  But little ’tis to her to hear my grief. 
  To her, who sees the pangs which I receive,
  And seeing, deigns them not the least relief.

Lorenzo de Medici’s idylls were particularly rich in descriptions of Nature and full of feeling.  ’Here too that delight in pain, in telling of their unhappiness and renunciation; here too those wonderful tones which distinguish the sonnets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries so favourably from those of a later time.’  (Geiger.)