I had got this far, and was thinking of what to say next, and as my habit is, I was pricking the paper idly with my pen. And I thought how, between one dip of the pen and the next, time goes on, and I hurry, drive myself, and speed toward death. We are always dying. I while I write, you while you read, and others while they listen or stop their ears, they are all dying.

The nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt noted that Jean Buridan had climbed the same mountain a few years before and ascents accompliPetrarchd during the Middle Ages have been recorded including that of Anno II Archbishop of Cologne. In 1345 he personally discovered a collection of Cicero's letters not previously known to have existed the collection ad Atticum. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism".

Petrarch would be later endorsed as a model for Italian style by the Accademia della Crusca. Petrarch's sonnets were admired and imitated throughout Europe during the Renaissance and became a model for lyrical poetry.