* * * * *

About the middle of April, Madame Guiccioli had been obliged to quit
Venice with her husband. Having several houses on the road from Venice to
Ravenna, it was his habit to stop at these mansions, one after the other,
in his journeys between the two cities; and from all these places the
enamoured young Countess now wrote to her lover, expressing, in the most
passionate and pathetic terms, her despair at leaving him. So utterly,
indeed, did this feeling overpower her, that three times, in the course of
her first day's journey, she was seized with fainting-fits. In one of her
letters, which I saw when at Venice, dated, if I recollect right, from "Cà
Zen, Cavanella di Po," she tells him that the solitude of this place,
which she had before found irksome, was, now that one sole idea occupied
her mind, become dear and welcome to her, and promises that, as soon as
she arrives at Ravenna, "she will, according to his wish, avoid all
general society, and devote herself to reading, music, domestic
occupations, riding on horseback,--every thing, in short, that she knew he
would most like." What a change for a young and simple girl, who, but a
few weeks before, had thought only of society and the world, but who now
saw no other happiness but in the hope of becoming worthy, by seclusion
and self-instruction, of the illustrious object of her love!

On leaving this place, she was attacked with a dangerous illness on the
road, and arrived half dead at Ravenna; nor was it found possible to
revive or comfort her till an assurance was received from Lord Byron,
expressed with all the fervour of real passion, that, in the course of the
ensuing month, he would pay her a visit. Symptoms of consumption, brought
on by her state of mind, had already shown themselves; and, in addition to
the pain which this separation had caused her, she was also suffering much