a winding rill with my Violante, or stroll to my friend the squire's, and
see how healthful a thing is true pleasure; and on wet days I shut myself
up, and mope, perhaps till, hark! a gentle tap at the door, and in comes
Violante, with her dark eyes, that shine out through reproachful tears,--
reproachful that I should mourn alone, while she is under my roof; so she
puts her arms round me, and in five minutes all is sunshine within. What
care we for your English gray clouds without?

Leave me, my dear Lord,--leave me to this quiet happy passage towards old
age, serener than the youth that I wasted so wildly; and guard well the
secret on which my happiness depends.

Now to yourself, before I close. Of that same yourself you speak too
little, as of me too much. But I so well comprehend the profound
melancholy that lies underneath the wild and fanciful humour with which
you but suggest, as in sport, what you feel so in earnest. The laborious
solitude of cities weighs on you. You are flying back to the /dolce far
niente/,--to friends few, but intimate; to life monotonous, but
unrestrained; and even there the sense of loneliness will again seize
upon you; and you do not seek, as I do, the annihilation of memory,--your
dead passions are turned to ghosts that haunt you, and unfit you for the
living world. I see it all,--I see it still, in your hurried fantastic
lines, as I saw it when we two sat amidst the pines and beheld the blue
lake stretched below, I troubled by the shadow of the Future, you
disturbed by that of the Past.

Well, but you say, half seriously, half in jest, "I will escape from this
prison-house of memory; I will form new ties, like other men, and before
it be too late; I will marry. Ay, but I must love,--there is the
difficulty." Difficulty,--yes, and Heaven be thanked for it! Recall all