will add to my favorites this splendid Hyperlinked & Searchable Chambers' 1869 'The Book of Days' from which I learned that today was the anniversary of Petrarch's first glimpse of Laura...

'The sainted Laura, illustrious for her virtues, and for a long time celebrated in my verses, was first seen of me in my early youth on the 6th of April 1327, in the church of St. Clara, at Avignon, at the first hour of the day; and in the same city, in the same month of April, ou the same sixth day, and at the same hour, in the year 1348, this light disappeared from our day, when I was then by chance at Verona, ignorant, alas! of my calamity. The sad news reached me at Parma, by letter from my friend Ludovico, on the morning of the 19th of May. This most chaste and beautiful lady was buried on the same day of her death, after vespers, in the church of the Cordeliers. Her soul, as Seneca says of Africanus, returned, I feel most assured, to heaven, whence it came. These words, in bitter remembrance of the event, it seemed good to me to write, with a sort of melancholy pleasure, in this place ' (that is, in the Virgil) 'especially, which often comes under my eyes, that nothing hereafter in this life may seem to me desirable, and that I may be warned by continual sight of these words and remembrance of so swiftly-fleeting life,—by this strongest cord broken,—that it is time to flee from Babylon, which, God's grace preventing, will be easy to me, when I think boldly and manfully of the fruitless cares of the past, the vain hopes, and unexpected events.'