Through a series of "essays in intellectual love," Ortega explores the aim of philosophy: to carry a given fact (a person, a book, a landscape, an error, a sorrow) by the shortest route to its fullest significance. He then considers how literature, specifically Cervantes, contributes to realizing this aim.

    It is not a piece of literary criticism; it is only incidentally a biography. It has been prepared with the single but lively hope of making a little clearer the development of modern culture. It views Petrarch not as a poet, nor even, primarily, as a many-sided man of genius, but as the mirror of his age - a mirror in which are reflected all the momentous contrasts between waning Medievalism and the dawning Renaissance. Petrarch knew almost everyone worth knowing in those days; consequently few historical sources can rival his letters in value and interest; their character and significance are discussed at length in the introduction to this book. At the time of original publication in 1898, James Harvey Robinson was Professor of History in Columbia University, and Henry Winchester Rolfe was Sometime Professor of Latin in Swarthmore College.