Rienzi made no reply; he did not heed or hear him--dark and stern
thoughts, thoughts in which were the germ of a mighty revolution, were
at his heart. He woke from them with a start, as the soldiers were now
arranging their bucklers so as to make a kind of bier for the corpse,
and then burst into tears as he fiercely motioned them away, and clasped
the clay to his breast till he was literally soaked with the oozing
blood.

The poor child's garland had not dropped from his arm even when he fell,
and, entangled by his dress, it still clung around him. It was a sight
that recalled to Cola all the gentleness, the kind heart, and winning
graces of his only brother--his only friend! It was a sight that
seemed to make yet more inhuman the untimely and unmerited fate of that
innocent boy. "My brother! my brother!" groaned the survivor; "how shall
I meet our mother?--how shall I meet even night and solitude again?--so
young, so harmless! See ye, sirs, he was but too gentle. And they will
not give us justice, because his murderer was a noble and a Colonna.
And this gold, too--gold for a brother's blood! Will they not"--and the
young man's eyes glared like fire--"will they not give us justice?
Time shall show!" so saying, he bent his head over the corpse; his lips
muttered, as with some prayer or invocation; and then rising, his face
was as pale as the dead beside him,--but it was no longer pale with
grief!

From that bloody clay, and that inward prayer, Cola di Rienzi rose a new
being. With his young brother died his own youth. But for that event,
the future liberator of Rome might have been but a dreamer, a scholar, a
poet; the peaceful rival of Petrarch; a man of thoughts, not deeds. But
from that time, all his faculties, energies, fancies, genius, became